Musings from Brian J. Noggle

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The debate over Missouri’s growing methamphetamine problem took a major turn Wednesday, as police from around the state demanded that some common cold pills used to make the drug be classified as regulated narcotics available only at pharmacies.

At issue is a chemical called pseudoephedrine. It’s an active ingredient in more than 80 over-the-counter remedies that are sold everywhere from gas stations to grocery stores. But pseudoephedrine also is a key ingredient in most recipes for meth, a powerful stimulant often called ice, crystal or crank.

Missouri last year toughened existing regulations on how much pseudoephedrine a store could sell to an individual customer, and added new restrictions on where those cold pills could be displayed. As a result, meth cooks and their helpers now must shop at dozens of stores to get the thousands of pills needed to make even a few ounces of meth.

Police at the summit said that without tougher regulations, the explosive increase in small meth labs will continue in Missouri and throughout the Midwest. Although most of the nation’s meth is made at a small number of large drug labs in Mexico and California, Missouri and the states it borders accounted for more than half of the meth-lab raids and related seizures last year.

In other news, fire marshals demanded that lighters, matches, and magnifying glasses be sold only over the counter as they can be combined with an accellerant to intentionally start a fire, MADD is protesting against the availabilty of fruits and dandelions to young people, who can then ferment them and drink the contents, and the anti-gun lobby to restrict the sales of steel, lead, and wood.

Legitimate purposes and rights are a threat to security. Just stand in your stall and bleat a little until its your turn, veal.

The City of San Francisco is running into budget problems because drivers just aren’t racking up the fines anticipated, reports the San Francisco Chronicle:

The Bay Area’s sputtering economy has meant good news for San Francisco drivers, who have seen a drop in competition for the city’s notoriously scarce on-street parking spaces, but bad news for City Hall’s finance wizards who count on fines for illegal parking to help balance the budget.

Unfortunately, building fines and excise taxes into the budget lead to this sort of problem. The government needs people to do proscribed things, or it needs to proscribe more things to keep spooning citizens’ money down its sucking maw. People might shriek over a property tax increase, or might vote down a sales tax hike, but who’s going to oppose raising a parking ticket fine?

Until your dentist appointment runs over fifteen minutes, or you don’t know the lottery-style system of proper side-of-street parking (stay overnight in Milwaukee, eh?) and suddenly you’re paying $250.

The silver lining, if you’re looking for something positive to say about profligate spending outpacing revenue: The anticipated shortfall is only $4 million dollars in the $352 million dollar deficit San Francisco’s running this year.

In another attempt to save the consumer from himself, the Illinois Attorney General is cattle-prodding the Illinois legislature to the rescue. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.

Typical sob lead:

When Michael Rogers drove out of a car dealership three years ago in his newly purchased GMC Jimmy, he thought he understood the financing arrangement. The interest rate the dealership gave him on the loan – 20.95 percent – sounded high, but the dealer had explained that Rogers’ checkered credit history had required it, and he’d accepted that explanation.

“I thought it was a good deal for me,” said Rogers, 45, a former postal worker in Chicago who is on disability. “I knew I’d had some credit problems … so, I figured, ‘Yeah, my credit must be bad.’ I figured this was the punishment.”

After more than two years of paying $409 a month on the car, Rogers learned that he had actually been approved for a 9.25 percent loan from a lender. Unknown to Rogers, the dealership had then added the additional 11.7 percent itself, raising the final cost on the $17,000 car by almost $7,000.

Aw, poor baby. You know, I got socked with a .9 percent financing rate in March, 2001. A year later, rates were 0 percent as car makers tried to ensure continued sales after September 11. So I feel your pain, pinhead.

21% on a car? Jesus H. Gonzalez, but that’s a damn high rate to pay. Come to think of it, $17,000 is a lot to pay for a vehicle, especially at 21% interest. It took me almost four years to run my credit cards up to that amount, but that included a night at a “Fantasy Suite” establishment which included an in-room swimming pool, sauna, waterfall, and complimentary bottle of champagne. A lot to spend for one person, but at least it wasn’t $17,000. What’s my point?

Oh, yeah, you, Joe Stupid Consumer, are an IDIOT to spend that much on a car at that rate of interest and assume it’s the best rate without shopping around. Fortunately, the Daley State will come to your aid and will straitjacket business because you, the consumer, are mad.

Attorney General Lisa Madigan is pushing legislation that would require car dealers to tell customers how much of their car loan interest rate was determined by the lender, and how much the dealer has added on to it.

Thank heavens! The Illinois Government to the rescue!

The markup system is common in auto financing nationwide, including in Missouri. Lawmakers in Missouri are not considering any legislation to require disclosure of the actual loan rate.

The Post-Dispatch ruefully reports this, because it’s on the side of the working man in every contest wherein the reigning champion isn’t the newspaper industry.

One dealer promised to get a car buyer the “best” rate for a loan. The dealer offered the customer a loan at 16.95 percent interest. It turned out that the dealer was secretly paying 14.95 percent interest to a lender and pocketing the difference.

“I asked the dealer why he was charging my client a higher rate than the one approved for my client,” says Mitchell Stoddard, an attorney in St. Louis County. “And he looked me in the eye and said: ‘We gotta pay our bills.'”

All right, your crackhead investigative journalism has probably uncovered a dealer offering a deal to a subprime customer, wherein the dealer says the “best” rate, and probably means the “best” in the sense of the best in which the dealer would offer. Come on, PD, you don’t hammer advertiser Anheuser Busch in any advertisement wherein it proclaims any superlatives, particularly those including taste–so why come down hard on the poor SOB auto dealer who has bought a corner lot and a couple junkers in a throw at the American Dream?

I have sympathy for the business in this case because 1.) it’s someone taking a shot at making money, and 2.) it entered the contract with its eyes open, unlike the less-than-savvy consumers you defend. But the intelligent don’t need government, or crusading “journalism,” protection. They understand the free, voluntary exchange in any business transaction.

We’d also prefer you not pollute the swimming pool with more legislation and regulation, thanks.

Today’s top story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Rams’ Little is accused of DWI.

At least he didn’t kill anyone this time.

Here’s what I wrote when he was sentenced for killing Susan Gutweiler in The Cynic Express(ed) 3.02:

A St. Louis Court has just this afternoon upheld the precedent that
although the law in our nation maintains that everyone is equal before
the blind, deaf, and especially dumb Maiden Justice, some animals are
more equal than others. Now in our very heartland, much like on this
nation’s more enlightened Left Coast, football players can kill innocent
women with near impunity.

Last October, Leonard Little, intoxicated Star Bonecrusher of some
sort or another for the St. Louis Rams, ran a red light in his great big
new Mercury Decimator sport utility vehicle and, true to his title,
rammed a smaller car that was quite lawfully making its way through our
downtown St. Louis streets. Susan Gutweiler died from it.

Gutweiler, a mother from Oakville, a suburb to the southwest of St.
Louis improper, died because she was in the right place—crossing an
intersection according to all applicable traffic laws—at the wrong time,
when a local footballer on the sixth-rate tax abatement and corporate
incentive money hole that passes for an NFL team in this town happened
out at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong blood alcohol
content and at the wrong speed. And she died, as the Post-Dispatch put
it, “later of her injuries.” Suffered when two tons of blood alcohol
content and metal compacted her proletariat car.

At least the media have not been silent throughout the debacle.
Although Gutweiler’s family will have to go on without a mother and a
wife, at least Leonard Little’s story is being told. The St. Louis
Rams, when their coach Dick, capital D-I-C-K, Vermeil has taken time to
reflect on crime and punishment in the United States, issued a frank and
thought provoking statement that the St. Louis Rams are not afraid to
embrace all members of their team, even those who get lit and run down
actual practicing members of Family Values.

No, the St. Louis media have emphasized the claims from Little’s
attorneys, therapists, and other millennial swamis that Little needs to
get back to work making the bountiful dollars that those of us here in
the inner ring suburbs can imagine only remotely. It’s part of the
healing process for him to get back out onto the field crashing into
other felons and earning the adulation of a public which bemoans the
collapse of society and the dearth of character in strangers but doesn’t
confuse the man’s personal life with the great job he does. No, Leonard
Little just wants to move on, find closure, and put it all behind him
that she got in front of him. Susan Gutweiler would probably have
wanted to move on, too, if she weren’t dead.

I know, I know, I should probably calm down. After all, the St.
Louis court today handed down the punishment for Leonard Little. Ninety
days in jail—NINETY DAYS IN JAIL–and four years’ probation. And the
conditions of the probation are pretty strict, I’ll admit. No booze, no
bars, no intoxicating substances. After all, the Post-Dispatch does
emphasize that he faces testing. It’s already obvious that he doesn’t
have the decency, self-discipline, or common sense not to drive
intoxicated without someone, maybe like a gruff-but-with-a-heart-of-gold
coach, on his case(where’s Billy Martin when you need him?). It’s not
as though Leonard Little, the Leonard Little who’s the linebacker for
the St. Louis Rams, wrote a Word Macro virus which crashed e-mail
servers or anything; he just struck someone down dead.

I don’t want to calm down. After the decision, the only quote from
the victim’s family and the only outrage I have heard so far, is that
someone should take justice into his or her own hands. That’s it. Just
a heated little quote certain to paint the family as unrealistic and
possibly vengeance seeking. I couldn’t blame them. After all, the
mishmash of judicial and legal wisdom has decided that Susan Gutweiler’s
forty-seven years of life are worth ninety days in jail, less than two
days per year.

Maybe I am just cynical. Not nearly as cynical as the buzzing
cloud around Leonard Little, the sycophants that tell him and us that
it’s not his fault and that somehow it serves the greater good for
society that the Little boy can drive about freely and play football,
but I’m getting there.

On the other hand, this time Little has not been found guilty of driving while intoxicated; perhaps he wasn’t. However, with one decal of a downed car already on his fuselage, I expect the worst from Little.

Michael Williams predicts a November headline.

After a Chuck-A-Rama-(But-Not-That-Mucha) restaurant manager threw out a low-carb eating couple for eating too much roast beef at a buffet restaurant, district manager Jack Johnson proved that not all PR is good PR when he said:

“We’ve never claimed to be an all-you-can-eat establishment,” said Johanson. “Our understanding is a buffet is just a style of eating.”

Mr. Johnson’s understanding implies that you pay full price to the buffet style restaurant for the convenience of not having a server attend you, not for the ability to eat until you’re full.

Smile, Mr. Johnson; you’ve just made a politician of yourself before the whole Internet.

(Link seen on Fark.)

By now, we’ve all heard the story about the freighter seized in Italy with a bunch of AK assault rifles hidden aboard, destined for the United States.

Here’s the lead for the New York Post story:

A Florida-based arms company is at the center of the international probe into a New York-bound ship seized in Italy while laden with thousands of Kalashnikov assault rifles, The Post has learned.

The AK-47s were apparently bound for Vermont.

Officials have linked Century International Arms Inc. in Boca Raton to the discovery of a cache of 7,500 AK-47s hidden beneath piles of properly labeled arms in several cargo containers confiscated in the port of Gioia Tauro in southern Italy several days ago.

So that would mean that some illegal automatic weapons were being illegally shipped, nay, smuggled towards the United States. What could be better?

The startling seizure prompted Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-Nassau) to call for a renewal of the 1994 federal ban on assault weapons, which is slated to expire Sept. 13.

“We know al Qaeda training manuals have encouraged terrorists to obtain assault weapons in the United States,” she said.

Oh, yeah, that. Renewing a law that wouldn’t apply to these weapons anyway, simply because some nitwit member of the House of Representatives can put the words assault weapon and Al Qaeda in a soundbite.

Thank goodness Al Qaeda training videos don’t involve attack dogs, or we’d be stripped of our Chiahuahuas, too.

With no sense of irony, I am sure, StLToday.com posted these stories atop each other in the Business section today:

St. John’s workers oust union:

Maintenance workers at St. John’s Mercy Medical Center voted 28 to 13 on Wednesday to decertify the United Association of Plumbers & Pipefitters Local 562 as their collective bargaining agent.

The union has until next week to protest the conduct of the election. If it does not, the National Labor Relations board will authorize the decertification. A plumbers-union official did not return a phone call Thursday. The maintenance workers’ contract expired Dec. 31, 2002.

Like the jingle, union label fades away

Calls for “Buy Union-Made” and “Buy American” might appear nostalgic in a day when X-rays of American patients are analyzed by physicians abroad and U.S.-produced shoes are nearly impossible to find.

But the union movement hopes its 130-year-old message to buy products with the union label and more recent calls to buy American are reinvigorated amid the growing debate about overseas outsourcing of service jobs and the steady loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States.

“First of all, union-made in the USA is No. 1. If you can’t find union-made, at least buy American-made,” said Charles E. Mercer, president of the AFL-CIO’s Union Label and Service Trades Department. “We say it in the same breath, the same sentence.”

Hmm. Perhaps it’s that American workers are tired of paying viggorish for the opportunity to strike put themselves out of work in the name of more pay and job security? [No, it’s that those damn capitalists are exploiting the workers we’re supposed to exploit. –Ed aka “Spike” (Local 355)]