Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Newark, New Jersey, used homeland security grants to buy garbage trucks:

Newark used federal Department of Homeland Security funds to help pay for 10 top-of-the-line, air-conditioned garbage trucks — and a group of state lawmakers think that stinks.

Newark unveiled its new garbage trucks last month — and boasted that the financing had partly come from “Homeland Security grants.”

Republican lawmakers yesterday blasted the city for “misuse” of federal money.

“It goes to the heart of credibility,” said Assemblyman Joseph Pennacchio, who noted New Jersey officials have been lobbying for more anti-terror funds.

“You can’t say we’re buying garbage trucks on one hand and we’re not getting enough Homeland Security money on the other.”

Not to mention that it’s illegal to buy garbage trucks with a Homeland Security grant, says the department.

To the lower governments, Federal tax dollars represent a fungible slush fund for whatever they want to buy. And there’s always more, minus the Federal government’s sizeable vigorish, of course.

Waiter, there’s a nose ring in my soup: Wyoming may ban facial piercings in restaurants

As if the hair in your salad wasn’t bad enough, a city health inspector in Cheyenne, Wyo. said there had been “several cases” of tongue rings and other facial jewelry found in the food in the city’s restaurants.

It was enough to persuade the Governor’s Food Safety Council to recommend banning facial jewelry for restaurant workers who prepare food — perhaps becoming the first state in the country to do so.

No word on brooches, pendants/necklaces, or earrings, many of which are more dangly and eligible to fall off. No, sir, instead, we have a state government moving at lightning speed to ban something based on anecdotal “evidence.”

Unfortunately, we expect nothing less.

Guestblogging at VodkaPundit, someone whose blog I don’t bother with slaps the state of Kansas. Why? Because it’s there.

Face it, Kansas is a plain-Jane. It’s “I Like Ike” and Bob Dole country. It reminds me of my mosted hated food – mayonnaise – pale, bland, uniform in consistency and boring. There’s no ocean, no mountains and its population is hardly a model of diversity. And it’s always going to be that way. A simply mediocre, generic kind of place, totally devoid of bathos, highs or lows.

Unwarranted. really, but undoubtedly it made the author feel better about herself and the state in which she lives.

How are you supposed to answer an ad statum attack?

Update: Dustbury’s thoughts.

Now that a judge in San Francisco has ruled that banning gay marriage invokes the magickal separate but unequal curse, I humbly suggest some other institutions which could use a judicial takedown for promoting separateness but equalness:

• Juvenile courts, which provide separate justice for youths which should have equal weight to adult punishment somehow.
• The Chinese New Year, which presents a separate numbering system and celebration that’s almost like the Gregorian celebration.
• State governments, which present different laws based on geographic location. All laws should be standard across the Fatherland.
• Gender-restricted bathrooms, which although numerous laws have mandated that facilities offer equal numbers of pots to piss in for men and women, women’s bathrooms often have lines out the door. Certainly, separate but unequal; oyez, oyez, all bathrooms shalt be unisex or boththesexes from this day forward throughout the land!
• Salary caps in professional sports, which enforce parity on sports teams, but a parity of pay, not of skill or performance.
• Political news coverage, which has proven to be three times friendlier to Kerry than George W. Bush. So it must be eliminated as it’s separate and unequal. Or made separate and equal under the divine guidance of the judiciary.

Unleash your inner Diana Moon Glampers!

Remember, friends, cameras cannot keep you safe; they can only provide prosecutors and law enforcement officials with leads and evidence after the bad guys do bad things. Control desk failed to notice assault on camera:

A video camera, which is supposed to be monitored by two guards in a command post, shows the two arriving in the holding area between two courtrooms, according to a law enforcement official who viewed the tape.

The video shows Hall guiding Nichols, whose hands are still handcuffed behind his back, face-first into one of two open cells.

Hall releases one cuff and turns Nichols around to unhook the remaining cuff, which is dangling from his wrist. She uncuffs him so he can change from a jail jumpsuit into street clothes.

The muscular, 33-year-old Nichols then lunges at Hall, knocking the petite, 51-year-old woman backward into another cell. Both disappear from camera view.

Because there is no audio recording with the camera, it is unclear whether Nichols shot Hall or caused her severe head injuries by hitting her with his fist and knocking her to the concrete floor.

Two to three minutes later, Nichols emerges from the cell, holding Hall’s gun belt and police radio. He picks up her keys from the floor and locks her inside the cell. Nichols then goes into a nearby cell.

A couple of minutes later he emerges, dressed in civilian clothes. He locks the door behind him and saunters calmly out of the holding area, carrying the gun belt, according to the law enforcement official who viewed the tape. Nichols appears to know exactly which key to use to unlock the holding area door and enters a vacant courtroom on the eighth floor.

The camera silently recorded it all. Remember this whenever your local law enforcement tells you that its new cameras will make your community safer. They will not.

San Francisco has determined that having convictions on your record might make people think less of you. So they’re all in favor of removing criminal convictions:

A young woman arrested for prostitution shared a harrowing tale of leaving her suburban home in the Bay Area and working for a sadistic pimp.

She escaped when her pimp was sent to prison. Now she is back with her family, working part-time and attending college. The poised and articulate 23- year-old wants her criminal past cleared so she can enter the field of her dreams: nursing.

A San Francisco program called Clean Slate may be the answer.

Using a little-known state law, the Clean Slate program run by the San Francisco public defender’s office got more than 1,500 criminal cases cleared last year. Another 2,227 are being processed.

The cleared cases — all committed in San Francisco — range from lesser charges such as prostitution and petty theft to more serious offenses including attempted rape, drug dealing, assault and vehicular manslaughter.

No harm, no foul. Harm? Eh, no foul either.

Sen. Paul Sarbanes won’t seek reelection

Too damn little, too late. When your name has been attached to a piece of legislation designed to hobble corporations and to transfer wealth from publicly-owned companies to accounting firms and the government, you’ve been in office too long. When your legislation is used as a perjorative amongst well-informed people (SOX you!), your retirement comes too late.

That McCain-Feingoldin’ Federal-power-mad, doin’-somethin legislator. May he retire in piece and not inflict current legislators with his lobbying.

Local government works for big corporations; however, apparently in Des Moines, the local government also obeys the dicta of big labor. After all, they threw out a low bid for a city contract probably because the low bidder used non-union employees:

Des Moines City Council members rejected saving $500,000 on a water detention basin project, turning away all bids because the lowest was too low.

The savings would have been large enough to nearly pay for last year’s decision to restore power to 4,200 streetlights that had been turned off in a cost-saving move.

“I respect the council members because I know they have a tough job, but this was” wrong, said Thelma Saxton, whose family owns Saxton Inc., which employs non-union labor.

Officials of Corell Contractor Inc. of West Des Moines and a lobbyist for the Central Iowa Building and Construction Trades Council contacted council members before this week’s vote and asked them not to hire Saxton. Corell employs union labor.

Iowa laws do not require cities to use union labor.

Silly newspapers. Laws are for fools, and government sweetness is for corporations and unions.

Apparently, the Easter Bunny is too Christian for some malls:

The Easter Bunny is a vanishing breed.

Not that there’s a shortage of 6-foot white rabbits carrying baskets of colored eggs. It’s just that Mr. Shopping Mall Bunny is becoming more politically correct.

The bunny at The Gardens mall Easter egg hunt last weekend — oops, make that just plain “egg hunt” — was called Garden Bunny.

“The name just complemented The Gardens of the Palm Beaches,” mall Marketing Director Jeannie Roberts said.

Saturday, Baxter the Bunny is available for photos at the Mall at Wellington Green. At Town Center in Boca Raton, Peter Rabbit will hand out goodies and pose for pictures.

“Because we’re such a multicultural community, it’s good just to remain neutral,” mall General Manager Sam Hosen said.

Unfortunately, the lack of diversity training has led to the ignorance which leads some cretins to identify Christian biblical origins for the Easter Bunny. Perhaps they think it stems from an old tradition enumerated in Deuteronomy or Leviticus. Golden calves, bad, but chocolate rabbits are okay.

Group: U.S. losing competitive edge:

Leaders of high-tech companies said the United States risks losing its competitive edge without significant new investments in education, research and development and the spread of broadband technology.

Whose investment?

They also called on Congress to increase basic research funding and make permanent a research and development tax credit; promote broadband development, in part by minimizing regulations; enact a U.S.-Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement; promote cyber-security initiatives; and continue to take steps to reduce frivolous lawsuits.[Emphasis mine, and probably theirs.]

You know, I cannot think of any personal problem I have that couldn’t be helped with buckets of free taxpayer money. Except for perhaps this distaste I have for spending tax money to benefit businesses.

I’m very disappointed to see that my State Senator has decided that a local company needs handouts to stick around:

But the battle between Missouri and Illinois could be just heating up. Express Scripts would get an estimated $35 million in incentives from Illinois to move its headquarters across the Mississippi River, a Missouri state senator said he has learned.

To keep the company in Missouri, Sen. John Loudon, R-Ballwin, said he has introduced an 11th-hour bill to improve Missouri’s menu of economic incentives. He filed the bill March 1 after meeting with St. Louis County officials.

“There is very real competition from other communities throughout the country that are making inquiries into one of our fastest-growing companies,” said Denny Coleman, president of the St. Louis County Economic Council. “The array of incentives programs we have here are not as strong as our competitor states.”

I don’t remember reading much about the preeminence of corporations in this country’s founding documents, but they certainly get a lot of attention and support from the governments, ainna?

Martin Braeske, planning supervisor for the St. Louis City school district, explains how finance works as he discusses the sale of schoolhouses:

The use of historic tax credits to restore the properties has been a factor in the bulk of the sales, Braeske said. “With schools like Emerson, developers need the credits to make the deal profitable, and they have to preserve the historic elements of the schools to qualify for the credits, so it’s a win all around,” he said.

That is, to comply with the government regulations, “private” developers need tax breaks from the government to buy the buildings for “free enterprise” reasons. Meanwhile, everyone else continues to pay taxes unabated because they’re not businesspeople or bureaucrats. A winner for all the people who matter.

Democrat state politicians are upset that Matt Blunt isn’t spending state tax money to fly himself around the state:

But state Democratic Party spokesman Jack Cardetti asserted that Blunt is once again showing “a lack of integrity” by allowing campaign donors to wield inappropriate influence in his administration.

“Special interests picked his Cabinet, and now they’re taxiing him around the state to further curry favor with him,” Cardetti said.

According to the Missouri Democrat party, if you don’t forcibly take money from taxpayers to spend on your own convenient travel plans, you lack integrity.