Category: St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch runs this story in the Sunday paper: Radioactive waste will roll through area. They include a map with the exact route the trucks carrying radioactive waste will use when driving through the St. Louis metropolitan area.

The free press, to gin up outrage, provides almost all the details the terrorists would need to implement the worst case scenario about which the free press foments its outrage.

I am not advocating censorship, but perhaps a sense of our free press that perhaps it’s unseemly to shout “There could be a fire!” in a crowded theater.

I predicted yesterday:

So keep an eye on it, gentle reader: when the dog bites man, it will be news in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch if it’s a pit bull doing the biting, and it will be one more anecdote to drive bad legislation.

Well, translated as augury, that means watch for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to grab hold of the pit-bull-attacks story with its teeth and not let go. Kind of like, you know, a pit bull.

The Post-Dispatch does not disappoint. Here’s today’s entry: Dog attacks: The solution proves elusive

While the family and friends of the victims of two pit bull attacks in St. Charles County try to understand what caused the animals to snap, experts are divided about how to prevent maulings.

Even pit bull advocates admit the dogs have an image problem.

Get that? Even pit bull advocates admit there’s a problem. But they’re only copping to an image problem. Ironic, ainna, that the admission comes in an article that casts pit bulls in a bad light.

But not to worry, citizens. The government is making its plans for the pit bull purge:

Unlike Missouri, Illinois law makes it illegal to enact breed-specific ordinances that would allow the state’s cities to ban certain breeds. A bill currently in the Illinois House, however, would change the law.

Furthermore, we get column inches lauding the bans:

Merritt Clifton, of Clinton, Wash., editor of the newspaper Animal People, disagreed and cited laws banning pit bulls in Denver and one being enacted in Ontario.

He said that dog-related legislation had historically allowed the dog one free bite before it was deemed a dangerous animal.

“The problem with pit bulls and also with Rottweilers is that the first dangerous incident is very often the first fatality or life-threatening injury,” he said. “So that one free bite doesn’t work when you’ve got that level of capacity to injure, and the issue is no longer whether the dog bites often but whether the dog bites at all.”

He said that pit bulls made up about 5 percent of the dog population in the United States, but that more than 50 percent of the dogs involved in fatal attacks or maimings have been pit bulls.

Delise calculates that pit bulls are involved in 21 percent of fatal attacks, the highest of any breed.

Well, what’s a newspaper to do? We don’t have sharks in Missouri. But we do have menacing pit bulls. It’s a twofer for a paper: it can tell harrowing stories with human victims in the man-versus-nature style, and it can goad the government to further curtailing freedom on behalf of the Little Man and/or The Children.

To be continued, undoubtedly….

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch might have taken an editorial stand on the whole round up all pit bulls and execute them idea: Do it!

Perhaps I’m reading a little too much into this story: Second pit bull attack injures boy:

Frightened, exhausted and thankful — that’s how a St. Charles County man and his 13-year-old stepson described their feelings a day after surviving a viscous [sic] attack by a relative’s pit bull at their home.

T-bone, a 3-year-old, 90-pound pit bull, was still biting Gary Wetteroff’s leg when sheriff’s deputies got to his home near St. Peters late Saturday night. The dog was trying to pull him to the ground.

“It’s trying to kill me; kill the dog,” Wetteroff yelled.

A deputy used a Taser to try to stop the animal, but one of the electrodes missed. The second officer pushed Wetteroff against the wall near the stairwell and told everyone else to get away. He fired one round from his .40-caliber Glock, killing the dog.

The beloved family pit bull, which had earlier attacked and killed another dog, attacked a boy as he wrestled with his brother. The attack comes right after another pit bull attack in St. Charles:

The incident was the second severe attack by a pit bull in St. Charles County in less than a week. Last Thursday, authorities said an autopsy revealed that Lorinze Reddings, 42, had been killed by his two pet pit bulls, who delivered a “sharp force and crushing injury to the neck,”[sic]

Why do I think that the Post-Dispatch has turned poochofascist? This paragraph:

She [Theresa Williams, director of St. Charles County Animal Control] said that St. Charles County’s laws are not breed-specific in their enforcement of dangerous animals because they can come in many different shapes, sizes and forms.

Undoubtedly, the reporter asked the question and then composed this error-ridden piece to expose the whole pit bull problem in the St. Louis area with an eye to a solution: breed-specific enforcement (confiscation and extermination).

So keep an eye on it, gentle reader: when the dog bites man, it will be news in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch if it’s a pit bull doing the biting, and it will be one more anecdote to drive bad legislation.

STATE SPENDING LIMITS: Trashing our future:

THE HOUSE BUDGET COMMITTEE approved a bill this month that is guaranteed to sink Missouri further into miserly mediocrity, while the rest of the country passes us by.

It would enshrine in the Missouri Constitution the shortchanging of our public schools, the decline of our state universities and the neglect of the poor and sick, abused children and the mentally ill.

Over the long haul, it would undercut the state’s economy, kill jobs and make Missouri a poorer, meaner place to live. It might increase crime, too.

The committee approved a proposed constitutional amendment that would limit increases in state general spending to the rise in state population, plus the rise in consumer prices and medical inflation. It would require a vote of the people to spend more than a smidgen over that limit. The effect would be to freeze spending at about today’s shriveled levels.

I cannot begin to comment coherently upon this editorial. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch encourages unbridled growth the of state government apparatus and, undoubtedly, of the wealth transfer from everyone who is not dependent on government for basic luxuries to those who are (that is, the “needy” or “state employees”).

More feature writing from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Whatever happened to Evelyn West?, which eulogizes a famous stripper in St. Louis from the 1950s:

Officer William Comeford filed his report – death apparently from natural causes – and returned to business as usual.

He ignored the clues that this 83-year-old woman once had been famous. They could be found in the stacks of provocative photographs all about her quarters; three bedrooms stacked with boxes that made it impossible to walk through the rooms. Some contained the outfits she donned backstage and then discarded onstage to the cheers of hundreds each night.

So last Sunday, it was sepia-toned love for homelessness. This week, it’s a page on an old, forgotten stripper. What’s next for the hard-hitting reporters at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch?

Crash kills suspect after two are shot to death

Notice how the actor in this headline is only the direct object. That’s just bad epistemology on the part of the Post-Dispatch.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch suffers from cognitive dissonance. Every once in a while, they post stories about companies leaving St. Louis, such as this analysis piece from February 5: Does loss of company HQs hurt St. Louis?:

St. Louis lost yet another homegrown corporate headquarters last week with the announced buyout of Pulitzer Inc.

And if the swirling rumors about a buyout of May Department Stores Co. are to be believed, an even larger corporate base could quickly follow Pulitzer out the door.

But while the region’s business leaders grit their teeth, they must ponder this question: Job loss aside, does it really matter if a corporation no longer calls your city home?

So they gnash their teeth for a bit, but then they jump on the bandwagon for the local labor whenever a local union strikes. Oddly enough, the Post-Dispatch cheerleads local labor strife and at any given time, the Post-Dispatch has at least one high profile dispute to rah-rah. Why, in 2004, we had:

St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

Auto dealer mechanics

Newspaper Guild (oddly enough, since that union struck against the Post-Dispatch, the paper was less eager to stick it to The Man)

Boeing Machinists

SBC

Grocery workers (end of 2003, I know, but it doesn’t seem that long ago)

So why would a corporation come to or stay in St. Louis, a labor-friendly town that supports entire workforces stopping work for days, weeks, or months on end? Perhaps the tax incentives that the local and state governments favor and the Post-Dispatch lauds.

The climate for business, particularly the manufacturing and blue collar businesses whose employees the Post-Dispatch champions, is difficult, murky, and prone to the whims of organized labor and government largesse. Why would a corporation base its business here?

Surprisingly, a commentary columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch doesn’t like Fox News or conservatives in the media:

“A PBS Mind in a Fox News World.”

I saw that slogan on a bumper sticker, and it resonated with me. I consider many news programs on the Fox network unabashedly partisan and ultraconservative. The idea that millions rely on it for news and information makes me wince.

You know, the thought that anyone gets news or insight from the Post-Dispatch would make me grimace, but I just can’t make that leap of disbelief. The funny pages, yes, because for the Post-Dispatch, they start on page one.

But by unleashing this common broadside of a normal newspaper commentariat who thinks airborne conservative communitariat are vain and whiny, I have to wonder what point the columnist is trying to make, and to whom he has targeted the piece. Does he want to draw the publicity ire of conservatives who will drive readers to him if only to mock him? Is he having a bit of fun with his small circle of readers who are reality-based in a real world?

Also, why do I care? But that’s enough questions for now.

It first came to my attention when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch did a front-page-of-the-Everyday-section story a couple of years back entitled “He’s Twelve Years Old and He’s Smarter than You” about a young man, twelve years old (if memory serves me), who was precocious and knew enough mathematical tricks for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to declare him smarter than Brian J. Noggle, or at least the average reader. I’ve discovered that paper has a habit of running stories highlighting young people with any sort of intelligence as wonderful curiosities.

It must be that time of year again, because the front page of the local news section carries the story “Triplets excel, but aren’t peas in a pod” which starts with this line:

Meet the 18-year-old Foglia triplets, who use SAT words like “acerbic” when asked to describe one another and who can lose their friends, parents and other adults with obscure, esoteric references.

They use “SAT words” (which means, I think, words that are found on standardized tests designed for high school students) like “acerbic” (which your humble narrator uses that word to describe himself all the time), and this makes these high school students stand out? Stand above the average Post-Dispatch reader, perhaps. Lose friends, parents, and other adults with obscure references? Not only can your humble narrator do this, but so can any other reasonably talented and specialized member of the geek community–which is not as small as one would think.

Note: To demonstrate his facility with the language, your humble narrator might point out that “obscure, esoteric” is redundant, and that the serial comma is not just a good idea, it’s the law, but this isn’t supposed to be about how smart Brian J. Noggle is. Were that the point of this blog piece, the author would also explain why he thinks Kavita, the name of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer, is such a pretty name, given its Hindic meaning. But we wouldn’t want to show off, would we?

I don’t know what sticks me in the craw of these stories, which have become quite the boilerplate for the Post-Dispatch. I hope it’s more that they treat intelligent young people as anamolies or sideshow oddities than because, well, they never wrote one about me when I was a high school underachiever and am a sensitive, albeit super-smart, young man.

Well, I was, before I got old and bitter.

Check out the cover of today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Note the headline: GIRL DIES AFTER FINDING GUN LEFT AT HOME. Although on the surface, it sounds like the headline’s telling the story, but it’s offering enough editorial comment about how the St. Louis Post-Dispatch feels about guns in the home, especially homes with children.

Drill down into the story, which is entitled Girl, 5, is shot to death at home online:

A 5-year-old East St. Louis girl died from a gunshot wound to her face Friday afternoon after she or her 9-year-old brother found a gun that belonged to their mother’s boyfriend, police said.

It is not yet known whether the girl shot herself or if her brother shot her.

Police said the children’s mother had left the girl and her brother with the mother’s boyfriend at the family’s townhouse in the 1800 block of North 43rd Street while she went to a grocery Friday afternoon.

The boyfriend, who police said had left his .40-caliber handgun loaded in the house, was on the second floor of the townhouse at the time of the shooting. Downstairs, police said, one of the children found the handgun. The girl was shot in the living room.

“He said he didn’t hear a shot,” Deputy Police Chief Rudy McIntosh said. “He didn’t even know what happened until the boy went upstairs and told him.”

Okay, let’s run down the list of details:

• East St. Louis, a city whose best neighborhood is merely a bad neighborhood.
• Mother’s boyfriend is watching the kids from upstairs, where he doesn’t hear a forty caliber pistol discharge.
• This particular handgun was in Illinois, where it’s not the easiest thing to have or hold a handgun.
• The gun was not stored upstairs, but downstairs, and was apparently not secured in any case.

Perhaps I’m overly suspicious, but before Illinois legislators propose outlawing guns in homes with or near homes with children, perhaps we better wait for more details. Of course, if this turns out to be a drug house or something, we won’t get further details. Just a poorly written headline intended to add to the torrent of anti-gun messages designed to further limit law-abiding gun owners without doing anything to prevent tragedies that occur with gun owners who are irresponsible or unlawful.

Bonus Snark:

Here’s how I immediately reacted to the headline:

• She just found it and had a heart attack!
• Look, honey, the Post-Dispatch is now in favor of concealed carry so you can take your gun with you!

Both make light of the headline, but ultimately, it’s not funny because some kid is still dead.

The St. Louis Post-Dipsatch once again deploys the passive voice creatively in a headline: Wal-Mart employee injured after man flees from store security:

Hendricks said the security officials were attempting to stop Taylor from leaving when Taylor put the car in reverse, allegedly causing injury to one of the Wal-Mart employees.

Man, what sort of style guide do they have down there on Tucker that says that injuries done in the course of a crime just happen spontaneously?

A slightly slanted story in the St. Louis Post-Dipsatch lauds:

There’s a bit of good news for beleaguered blue collar workers in St. Louis: On average, their pay trails their white collar counterparts’ by just $3.73 an hour, the narrowest margin among large U.S. metro areas, Labor Department data show.

In other regions, the gap between blue and white collar hourly pay was as large as $14.12 in mid-2003, according to the data, the most recent figures available.

While there’s no clear explanation for the smaller difference in St. Louis, it’s likely evidence of a few trends and unique features of the area economy, experts said.

Credit the region’s rich union tradition, economists say. And “we have several high-paying manufacturing companies here, like Boeing, the automakers and Anheuser-Busch,” said Donald Phares, an economist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.

Blue collar workers in this region earned an average of $17.72 an hour in mid-2003. That put St. Louis near the top, above several areas with higher costs of living. In Denver, for example, blue collar workers averaged $15.55 an hour.

While that’s nice, one with a less unionphilic attitude might hit immediately on these other ramifications first:

• White collar workers are underpaid in St. Louis, which explains why young people get degrees and leave.
• Manufacturers, with an eye on labor costs, won’t relocate to St. Louis. Heck, it takes large “incentives” to keep the existing ones here, which means that the blue collared employees and the underpaid white collar employees (and the forgotten pink collar employees–whatever happened to them?) waste a portion of their taxable incomes keeping those manufacturers here. Oh, and fresh new ballparks.

Remember, friends, that every high price is a boon for some seller and every low price is a bargain for some buyers, and you too will understand economics and will be disqualified from journalism.

Also, please note my new favorite made-up epithet: dipsatch. Man, that just sounds like a nasty thing to call someone, ainna?

Courtesy of Allahpundit, we find this analysis of current events in Afghanistan courtesy to someone closer than Tucker Boulevard:

Three years after the Taliban were chased out, Kabul has returned to the real world. The streets are jammed with cars, the shops are full of goods. Last year Afghanistan’s economy grew by 30 per cent. The weirdest thing about Kabul under the Taliban used to be its unnatural silence. Now it’s as noisy as anywhere on earth.

This week, though, the move back towards teeming normality has received a perceptible check. The host of restaurants that have opened up here (I remember only three during the Taliban days, all disgusting and utterly predictable as to the menu) are empty.

And:

This is not Baghdad. The Americans and their allies are not unpopular here – except in the east and south of the country, where there has been fighting – and they are regarded as guarantors of Afghanistan’s stability. The West is seen as essentially benign. At the international donors’ conference in Berlin last April, $8 billion in aid and investment was pledged over the next three years: about as much as the Afghan economy can absorb.

There is no equivalent here of the stories you hear every day in Iraq, about people being insulted or mistreated by American soldiers; no suburbs, towns or cities are attacked with the latest American weaponry. If Afghanistan gets safely through this week, it will be a remarkable success story.

Eric Mink probably has enough cosmopolitan stuporhuman skill at seeing through reality to the fantasy beneath to ignore these hopeful signs. Still, I think he would waste even less of my time were he still in the clique that lauds Desperate Housewives for lifting a leg on the American Dream, wittily and intelligentsially, of course.

From a news analysis piece on Sunday entitled New media beat old in testing veracity of Bush memos, which describes how bloggers uncovered the memo forgeries broadcast by CBS:

Hours after “60 Minutes” aired what it said were memos written in 1972 and 1973 by Bush’s squadron leader, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, a man using the name Buckhead posted a comment on Free Republic (http://powerlineblog.com), a right-wing bulletin board.

That’s precious. In an article about how new media checks the old media’s facts and calls them on mistakes, the old media mistakenly gives the URL for Power Line Blog when talking about Free Republic.

Remedial Google classes for all Post-Dispatch writers and editors, stat. Not stet, dammit, stat!