Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Supreme Court rules: All Your Base Are Belong To Us.

Local officials, not federal judges, know best in deciding whether a development project will benefit the community, justices said.

“The city has carefully formulated an economic development that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including — but by no means limited to — new jobs and increased tax revenue,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin rounds up.

Alternate Title: Supreme Court Acts to Solve Housing Bubble Problem

Longer Yellow Lights Reduce Accidents.

But longer yellow lights don’t balance municipal budgets, so don’t expect the cameras to go away.

The transcripts and recordings of the last words during airline crashes.

(Link seen on Boots and Sabers.)

Should cities be ISPs?

No.

Somehow, they get a whole story out of it.

Interesting word choice, Mr. Blankley:

Although this is a heavily researched book that includes amongst its sources almost a hundred people who are or were personally close to Mrs. Clinton, this is not a peek through a keyhole. Instead, it is a peek — and more than a peek — into the mind of Hillary. And, whether you like or hate Hillary, the inside of her mind is a fascinating place in which to rove about.

Now I know I will look for Hillary to be bushed from how politics have gored her.

(Link seen on Power Line.)

Found in a column by John Stossel:

<ñor> “No matter how hard women work, or whatever they achieve in terms of advancement in their own professions and degrees, they will not be compensated equitably!” shouted Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., at a “wage equity” rally in Washington, D.C.

Undoubtedly, the distinguished gentleperson is upset she makes $118,575 and her male colleagues make $158,100.

(Link seen on Outside the Beltway.)

What do you do if you’re a local government with a surplus? Turn it into a deficit! But Creve Coeur, Missouri, is rather blatant about it:

The Creve Coeur City Council is considering the proposed budget that begins July 1 and ends June 30, 2006.

The council is expected to vote on the proposed budget at its June 27 meeting.

The proposed budget for all funds shows revenues at $16.8 million and expenditures at $16 million. The apparent $800,000 surplus actually will be routed to long-term personnel funds, leaving the city with a $300,000 deficit in the general fund.

Uh oh! Deficit! You know what that means! Time to raise taxes:

The proposed budget includes a modest raise in what residents pay the city through their personal property taxes. Perkins said residents currently pay 7 cents per $100 assessed valuation. He said the city has not determined the amount of the increase but expects it will be between 8 and 9 cents.

Perkins said although an exact amount has not been determined because information from the county assessor’s office has not arrived, the city is looking at personal property tax numbers that would translate to about $13 a year more for a home valued at $350,000. The money would generate about $140,000 more for the city.

Other taxes in the city have gone up in recent years. The city’s utility tax, after decades of being at less than 5 percent, increased to 6 percent last year and will rise to 7 percent July 1.

Some businesses in the Olive Boulevard Transportation Development District increased their sales tax by one-half percent. The money will be used to pay for roadway and other improvements in the district. The city will not receive money from that increase.

Perkins said the city has begun looking into whether it should consider increasing its tax on business licenses. He said the matter will be reviewed by the city’s economic development and finance committees, but the issue is not part of the proposed budget for 2006.

• Personal property taxes–that is, cars and things that apartment dwellers pay, too
• Sales taxes
• Business license costs

Creve Coeur is on its way to becoming the perfect municipal government. An efficient tax raising and expending machine.

Why are poll numbers for the Iraq war slipping? According to Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post, the obvious answer is:

Not enough hippies:

In the absence of an antiwar movement, the American people have turned against the war in Iraq. Those two facts, I suspect, are connected.

He also goes on to use the term “U.N. aegis” without sarcasm, which indicates that the word does not mean what he thinks it means.

The aegis was Zeus’s shield, and as the residents of Rwanda and Srebrenica could attest (if they weren’t dead) that the U.N. cannot defend anyone but its leaders. The aegis was not Zeus’s proclivity to come down from on high and copulate with underage natives, which is a trait UN peacekeepers do share with the lord of the thunderbolt.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

American Airlines management, unions stand together on pensions:

Keep those pension checks coming.

That will be the battle cry today of some 300 American Airlines employees, who plan to flood the halls of Congress and lobby for pension reform. Airline management and key unions say they are united in preserving employee pensions, a benefit that’s been waylaid at other passenger carriers that have succumbed to bankruptcy.

I bet they can all agree that the lush government teat can do everything: Keep those checks coming to employees, and remove obligations from the company and its management.

Remind me to offer a pension plan that I cannot afford to anyone I hire; after all, if I get big enough and bankrupt enough, I won’t have to follow through on my contractual obligations, either.

A story about a biofeedback video game as part of therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder:

Once a week, Pfc. Joshua Frey, a Marine who spent several months in Fallujah before he was shot Dec. 12, heads to a darkened office in the Naval Medical Center here and places a headset over his eyes.

He attaches biofeedback sensors to his arms, hands and chest, grabs hold of a joystick and enters a video game version of the Iraq war. As he moves through a “virtual” Fallujah, he encounters sniper fire, explosions and insurgents lurking in shadows. A Navy psychologist checks readouts from a flat-screen monitor showing the Marine’s heart rate, breathing, hand perspiration and skin temperature.

But for Frey and the U.S. military, this is no game. It is part of a potentially groundbreaking approach to treating the effects of severe combat stress, in Iraq and elsewhere.

A game with explosions and gun fire that’s designed to make people saner? Surely, Illinois Governor “Bod” Blagojevich’s head must be spinning, pending a catastrophic failure akin to supercomputers whose logic circuits Captain Kirk fried routinely through paradox.

Sure, some periodicals put headlines on press releases and run them as news. But the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel goes further and innovatively turns to its classified ads as a news source:

From a pale pink velvet fringed chaise to wrought iron patio furniture, the earthly belongings of Milwaukee restaurateur Sally Papia and her daughter will be sold piece-by-piece this week in an estate sale described in a classified advertisement as of one of the area’s finest in 33 years.

I wonder how much that cost, but I am cynical.

Not a refutation:

Dick Cheney says:

“I’ve never been able to understand his appeal. Maybe his mother loved him, but I’ve never met anybody who does. He’s never won anything, as best I can tell,” Cheney said in an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes.”

Howard Dean responds:

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, responding to criticism from the vice president, said he doesn’t “care if Dick Cheney likes my mother or not.”

Um, the only aspersion Dick Cheney cast against Mrs. Dean was that she might have loved Howard Dean. That’s hardly an insult against Mrs. Dean, no matter how the press or Howard Dean want to portray it.

The Summer of the Pit Bull continues in San Francisco:

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom endorsed a series of measures Monday he hopes will reduce the likelihood of attacks by aggressive and dangerous dogs in the city, including spaying and neutering regulations, a ban on backyard breeding, and imposing fines on irresponsible canine owners.

The city can enact some new policies right away; others that regulate specific breeds, however, would require a change in state law first.

The primary target of the city’s crackdown will be pit bulls and pit bull mixes, which are responsible for at least half the vicious dog cases handled by city authorities. City officials don’t want to ban pit bulls but are seeking to regulate them.

Headline: Senate again refuses to confirm Bolton.

According to the crack mathematical theorists at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the 38 Senators who voted against cloiture–the end of the debate, and not actually for or against Bolton’s appointment–is enough to cast the action as though the entire Senate had refused to confirm Bolton.

To express this algebraically:

Compare and contrast this to any action of conservative legislators or leaders, whose mere majority election or decision does not give a mandate for conservatives to speak for all members of a given group.

Update: Apparently, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune has the same mathematicians: Bolton nomination again blocked by Senate

Headline, San Francisco Chronicle: Dems Vote Down Bolton:

Well, except the Democrats just voted to keep Bolton for coming to a vote because the Republicans would have confirmed him.

But that’s just nuance.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)