Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Bush threatens to veto Medicare changes:

President Bush on Friday threatened to veto any changes Congress tries to make to Medicare’s new prescription drug benefit, which takes effect in January 2006.

“I signed Medicare reform proudly and any attempt to limit the choices of our seniors and to take away their prescription drug coverage under Medicare will meet my veto,” Bush said at a swearing-in ceremony for Mike O. Leavitt, the new secretary of Health and Human Services.

Yeah, I voted for him. So now he threatens to veto any attempt to rein in the profligate spending-to-buy-votes. As his first veto in five years in office.

With great power comes great irresponsibility, perhaps, but at least he’s not as bad as the other guy would have been, and his foreign policy will allow us to live in a world safer than the alternatives so we can enjoy a future of financial collapse. But man, sometimes I have to work at convincing myself.

Eleven arrested after police find keg party in moving truck:

Police officers broke up a 21st birthday party and charged 11 people with underage drinking after pulling over a U-Haul moving truck with the revelers inside, officers said.

The most encouraging fact:

Officers allowed the partygoers to call for rides and no one was arrested.

But those who weren’t yet 21 were charged with underage drinking. If found guilty, each person could face a $255 fine or 30 days in jail.

Fortunately, though, none of the underage drinkers were elementary school kids with butter knives, because that would have been a different story.

Unfortunately, as I make juxtapose the behavior to prove the outrageousness of the zero-tolerance policy in schools yielding felony arrests, some might think the proper way to put balance into law enforcement would be to riding in the back of a rental truck a felony.

Missing Halliburton shipment of radioactive material found in Boston:

A Halliburton Co. shipment of radioactive material that landed in New York in October was lost en route to Texas, and was not found until Wednesday, when it turned up in Boston.

The material two sources of the element americium, used in oil well exploration was found intact at a freight facility after an intense search by federal authorities. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it was not alerted to the missing shipment until Tuesday.

Boston was under a heightened state of alert in January and didn’t uncover this unexplained radioactive shipment with its radioactivity detectors and whatever other means it employed to investigate the dirty bomb threat.

Sleep tight.

End to Amtrak funding unpopular:

Wisconsin’s top transportation official Monday blasted President Bush’s budget proposal to eliminate all federal funding for Amtrak.

“I think it stinks,” state Transportation Secretary Frank Busalacchi said.

Who joins this apparatchik in bemoaning the loss of federal funding for a railway used by a few but employing many?

Similar comments came from Amtrak management, the National Association of Railroad Passengers and the United Transportation Union, which represents Amtrak conductors.

Oh, yeah, the cool kids.

A more accurate headline more likely would have been End to Amtrak funding met with general apathy by majority, but that hardly tells Journal-Sentinel readers what to think, ainna?

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.