Since WordPress’s statistics use Universal Time Coordinate (essentially the time in London not counting daylight savings), 2007’s statistical year ended as of 6 PM tonight. And since 2007 was this blog’s first full calendar year in existence on WordPress, I added up the numbers.
You visited 254,775 times in 2007, averaging 698 a day. The best day was November 28 with 1,673 views.
Thank you that many times.
P-D, on the history of the stretch of Highway 40 that’s about to close:
Extending the expressway east to Brentwood Boulevard proved challenging. The buildup to World War II resulted in labor shortages and slowed construction. Manpower was so short that the contractor building the McCutcheon Street overpass asked permission to use German prisoners of war as general laborers. The federal government said no.
According to the Geneva Convention, foreign POWs were allowed to work in the domestic industry of their captive country, but not for industry related to the country’s ability to wage war. Oddly enough, the Federal government said no to Kraut POWs building an overpass, but at the same time, they said yes to using them to harvest cotton in the southeast Missouri delta. While cotton is not ostensibly a military industry, the clothes, garments and raiment of soldiers and sailors had to be made of something.
AP: LA Gang F13 Accused of Targeting Blacks
Hey, NAACP and Congressional Black Caucus. These are your friends that you love so much, that you hate whitey so bad and want to spite him in order to let more of into the country. (And from the looks of the above photo of F13 gang members, it appears to be a co-ed gang.)
New York Post: Bond Rescue Plan [For Cities] — Bailout By Buffett
And we thought SNL was joking in 1992 when they said that Ross Perot’s Plan B for paying down the national debt was to put it on his Visa.
AP: Study: Young adults heavy library users
“The age of books isn’t yet over,” said Lee Rainie, Pew’s director. This news will make someone I know in Arkansas very happy.
Even as all “Netscape” releases since Version 6 have been nothing more than re-branded versions of the Mozilla Internet Suite or Mozilla Firefox, the America Online subsidiary of Time-Warner, Inc. won’t even bother with that anymore.
The headline of this story is “AOL Kills Netscape’s Future, Leaves Firefox To Battle IE,” and the dateline is December 28, 2007. The headline and story would be almost as true if the year were changed to 1998, and “Firefox” changed to “Mozilla.” And even in the context of today, the headline is inaccurate, because Firefox isn’t literally alone in battling IE.
In spite of the conventional “wisdom” peddled on about 90% of the timespace in yesterday evening’s cable TV talk shows, and in other places, I don’t think the Bhutto assassination will affect the Presidential race.
You’re telling me that people who don’t know who she was, or couldn’t find Pakistan on a map, are going to make it their number one concern?
Actually, if it’s going to help any candidate, it will help Ron Paul, whose reaction to the Bhutto assassination yesterday was, in effect, “it’s none of our business, let’s not make it any of our business, we’ll be sorry if we do.” All the other ones made fools of themselves with their “Pakistan needs more democracy” idiocy — democracy in Pakistan would empower the AQ- and fundamentalist-types who are the #1 suspects in her assassination.
These are the most literate cities in the US, according to a study published in USA Today.
Top ten 2007
Minneapolis (2nd in 2006)
Seattle (1)
St. Paul (5)
Denver (8)
Washington (7)
St. Louis (12)
San Francisco (9)
Atlanta (3)
Pittsburgh (6)
Boston (11)According to the article, the rankings are based on an analysis of reading habits in U.S. cities with populations of 250,000 or more (69 this year) examines several measures in six categories: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources.
Last year’s rankings are in parentheses.
“Newspaper circulation?” Does this include, in the case of St. Louis, the free weekly Suburban Journals that hardly anyone reads?
“Number of bookstores?” “Library resources?” In the city, those are the quietest places one can find indoors.
“Educational attainment.” Insert all the stories about illiterate high school graduates here.
“Internet resources.” Should read “access to porn.”
Dave Lindorff (the Bill White of the left-wing), writing in the Baltimore Chronicle, is jubilant that “global warming” will inundate red states and conservative voters.
I’m glad to know the other side has its nutcases.
Actually, I thought the party line from the left was that global warming would disproportionately affect non-whites throughout the world, and racial minorities in America. And if it affects the American Southwest, as Lindorff thinks, at the point in the future when that will happen, it will affect a lot more Hispanics than whites.
There’s a lot of talk about instability in Pakistan now, which is a scary concept because of its government’s nuclear weapons, but I think this could spin in the other direction, that Pakistan will become more stable.
We could easily see Musharraf restore the “state of emergency” that he just lifted, in effect becoming a moderate or secular despot. And the recent history of the Middle East shows that secular despots are most likely to maintain stability. Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran are examples of such, who kept the AQ-types and fanatics in check by torturing them, but American diplomatic and military pressure, based on this unhealthy obsession with “democracy” everywhere, led to the fall of both, and of course Iraq and Iran have become more radical and unstable in earnest.
USA Today: Teen drinking, anger a bad mix
Does that mean adult drinking and anger is a good mix?
Reuters: Help for immigrants divides congregations
The congregation of a suburban Cincinnati United Methodist Church (a very liberal denomination) being split over the church’s aid and sanctuary to illegal aliens would be like half of all Democrats saying that they’re voting Republican next year.
“I know what it takes to get a criminal case,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a former state prosecutor and member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. “. . . Why is it that hundreds of bar owners can be sanctioned in Missouri every year for letting somebody with a fake ID have a beer, but we can’t manage to sanction hundreds of employers for letting people use fake identities to obtain a job?”
***
Now that the presents are open and the ham is consumed, let me entertain you with a good laugh: My 2007 Predictions on this medium from January 1 of this year.
1. Plans will be finalized to put a number of prefab condos where Cleveland NJROTC High School’s football field and chemistry lab and pseudo-armory used to be.
Bonk. In fact, there’s still an effort to save the buildings.
2. Schnucks will announce that they will renovate their Grand and Potomac location a la the Target in Hampton Village, meaning limited ground-level parking, a lot of underground parking, leaving enough room for more retail space. Mayor Slay will praise the move, touting that a major grocer is returning to St. Louis.
Bonk. But I bet the Mayoral press release is pre-written should it happen.
3. Ted Kennedy and John McCain will introduce a new plan to end illegal immigration forever, which won’t be much different from their old plan.
Sort of a ding. In fact, it was several dings.
4. St. Louis City Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Diana Bourisaw will be fired, and so will her successor. MODESE will continue to bluff about a takeover, while Mayor Slay and the Post-Dispatch editors will bemoan the “chaos and instability” in the SLPS, the latter doing so in every other DTI issue during the year.
Bonk all the way. She’s still here, and DESE didn’t just “bluff” about a takeover, they did it.
5. By the end of the summer construction season, MODOT will announce that the Highway 40 reconstruction project will take eight more years for a total of nine, instead of the three overall years they are projecting now.
Bonk. They’re still committed to three, though getting it done in three will cause a lot of traffic headaches. If you think the section closing in 2008 is bad, wait ’till 2009.
6. Mitt Romney will bow out of the 2008 Presidential Race. Also in the Gubernatorial world, I sense an impeachment or resignation of some relatively unpopular Republican governor in some state, though I don’t think it’ll be Blunt. My guess is either Mitch Daniels of Indiana, or Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky. And Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) will win reelection over Bobby Jindal (R) for GOV-LA, for the same racial reasons she beat him in 2003.
Bonk all the way. As you know, Blanco declined to seek another term, essentially meaning that Jindal would win, as he did. Fletcher wasn’t impeached, but he was defeated. For the life of me, I can’t remember why I made that Romney prediction.
7. While Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to be fading in various Democrat Presidential polls now, it’s just MSM hype during a slow news cycle, especially regarding that dark one from Chicago. By December 31, she will have the nomination virtually locked up such that all the 2008 Primaries and Caucuses on the Democrat side will be formalities. Her intraparty competition will either get out of the way voluntarily or be pushed out of the way (perhaps in a nefarious sense of the phrase) during 2007.
Bonk. She’s still “fading,” in fact, she is as faded as she has ever been. Still, I don’t think Clinton, Inc. is to be denied.
8. Ford or GM or maybe both seek bankruptcy protection and announce reduction of their assembly line work force by a very high fraction.
Bonk. One of them actually turned a profit for one quarter. Chrysler, which was spun off of Daimler, is said to be “operationally bankrupt,” whatever that means. And Ford and GM are still on shaky ground.
9. A low-level civil war will break out between blacks and Hispanics in California sometime during the summer, lasting about a month. It will likely be in L.A., but Oakland isn’t out of the question. It will necessitate a callup of the National Guard, though Gov. Schwarzenegger and President Bush will at first be loath to “pull the trigger” on calling up the Guard for that purpose, because of the fear of “racism” cat calls from black and Hispanic civil rights orgs.
Bonk mostly. Black-Latino violence was worse then ever, but it wasn’t that bad.
10. After Independence Day and another truncated and poorly attended Fair St. Louis, there will be serious talk about ending the Fair for a number of years if not permanently, despite Mayor Slay’s propaganda about 2007’s Fair being a great success.
It wasn’t much better attended than 2006’s Fair, and there’s no talk about ending it. Bonk.
11. The former St. Louis Center will complete its first of many many years as being empty, unused, and deteriorating. Meanwhile, Mayor Slay will publicly praise every rumor of the revitalization of the edifice as evidence of urban renewal.
Bonk. It’s being renovated into something right now. But we’ll see how long this “something” it becomes lasts after it opens.
12. The big semi-circular hole north of New Busch Stadium in downtown St. Louis that exists on January 1, 2007, will still be there unmolested on December 31, 2007.
Ding ding ding ding ding. There’s still talk of finalizing a Ballpark Village deal. You know what there still is? An empty, unmolested semi-circular hole north of Busch Stadium. And with baseball* exposed as a drugged-up fraud in the Mitchell Report, there might never be a need for a Ballpark Village.
So 1.5 out of 12 right answers, gives me a big time prognostication batting average of a buck and a quarter. This should mean my upcoming 2008 Predictions (look for them next week) will be taken with a grain of salt.
AP: Britain’s queen takes up YouTube
If she takes out a MySpace page next, she’ll spend the rest of her reign rejecting friendship requests from perennially shirtless ghetto men.
In fact, he was more liberal as Arkansas Governor than Clinton. But the criticism is coming from one Massachusetts politician that flip flops even more blatantly than the one that wanted to be President four years ago.
Government under fire over ‘black only’ school trips funded by tax payer
Black pupils are enjoying Government-funded school trips that exclude white students.
One hundred schools have signed up to the controversial Black Pupils Achievement Programme, which the Government is piloting in an effort to reduce persistent under-achieving among black children.
Participating schools are encouraged to develop ideas to improve learning and behaviour among black pupils and to involve their parents more.
But the £1.3million-a-year programme also funds trips, through large grants, that white children cannot attend.
Black pupils are taken to galleries, museums and the offices of local companies up to four times a year to be inspired into working harder at school.
If that’s the reward, then I don’t think the scheme will work. Yes, it’s racially discriminatory, but on the flip side of the coin, it’s money well wasted.
Steroids:Baseball::Grade Inflation:Schools
Screenshot of the Drudge Report at the time of this writing:
The animal in the middle is a picture of a red panda kept at the Des Moines Zoo, and the red panda is walking in the snow.
Another name for the species is firefox.
But don’t be fooled by either name — it’s a mustelid, related to badgers and weasels, not a bear-family panda, or a canine-family fox.
CNN:
Iowa students could sway caucuses, if they show up
For college students, winter break is a time for vegging out and relying on mom and dad to do the laundry.
But in Iowa, Democratic presidential campaigns are crossing their fingers that this bloc of voters can snap out of vacation lethargy and drag themselves to the caucuses on January 3.
Iowa election laws allow out-of-state students attending college there to vote, and 17-year-olds can vote in the caucuses as long as they are 18 years old by election day.
This means that any given non-Iowan going to school in Iowa could caucus in Iowa then caucus/vote in their home state when it’s their turn. The concept of one person having two votes in a quasi-Federal election doesn’t grab me.
In the 2004 Iowa Democratic caucuses, only 17 percent of all caucus-goers were between the ages of 17 and 29, and the majority of that age group was made up of people over the age of 22.
If one compares those figures to the fact that more than 65 percent of caucus-goers that year were over 45 years old, it’s easy to understand why courting the traditional Iowa caucus attendee can prove more successful than relying on college-age voters.
Perhaps Iowa is different, because theirs are the last big-time caucus left, but take it from someone who has participated in a caucus before (and helping to give Pat Buchanan an upset victory in Missouri’s 1996 Republican Caucuses), if politics are old people’s games, then cauci are even more so. In that particular hall where the caucus was held, I was a few weeks shy of 19 years old, but the only person in the room under 40.
Only the biggest and best HDTV flat screens will do for their welfare-dependent community activists.
Popular Mechanics puts new KITT’s chops up against the old one.
I was about to say that the only problem is that NBC got a soap opera twit to play Michael Knight’s “estranged son,” but then I remembered that David Hasselhoff was a soap opera twit himself pre-KN.
Parody Lyrics (c) Earl P. Holt III
Set to the tune of “Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash
***
We should have seen this comin’; Arnold’s gone around the bend,
He’s pandered to the liberals, since, I don’t know when.
He plans to empty Folsom Prison; He wants to set them free,
That’s Twenty Thousand felons, to prey on you and me.
When I was just a young man, my daddy told me “Son,
Those moderate Republicans, don’t ever trust a one.”
Yet, I cast my vote for Arnold, I thought that he’d be strong,
When I heard what Arnold’s up to, I knew that I was wrong…
I bet there’s convicts scheming in their cells and in the loo,
How they’re gonna rob some fat bank, or stick-up me and you.
We just cannot let this happen; These scumballs can’t be free.
But the Governor’s not kidding, and that’s what worries me.
If Arnold frees these losers from their California slam,
I bet they go bafatza, and soon go on the lam.
And when they’re back in prison, this time let’s make crime pay,
Give ‘em “Boot-Camp” and baloney; now that would make my day.
***
(All rights reserved.)
I was channel surfing last night, and I landed on some entertainment gossip show. It was about Britney Spears’s 16-year old sister expecting a baby, and the show went to Iowa to ask Mike Huckabee his opinion.
Fred Thompson might be a better authority here. He was married and a father at the age of 17.
Even better than that would be the political figure who has made herself America’s foremost Spearsologist — Kendel Ehrlich.
AP: NYPD going green on electric scooters
And maybe one day they’ll also get around to arresting criminals.
CSM: World’s next outsourcing hub: Kenya?
“Hello, my name is Andrew. May I help you?” in an east African accent — you won’t really believe his name is Andrew, will you?
Reuters: Tent city in suburbs is cost of home crisis
Welcome to Bushville.
The last time we heard from Bill Haas, he was quitting the only elected office he has managed to win in his life to compete on a reality show. Maybe he got kicked off the island a bit too soon. Or maybe he never made it to the island.
Post-Dispatch:
Former St. Louis School Board member Bill Haas filed a motion in federal court in St. Louis today requesting an injunction against the Missouri Department of Transportation stopping it from shutting down Interstate 64 (Highway 40) for construction beginning Jan. 2.
(snip)
In his filing, Haas said that MoDOT did not consider the safety, health and welfare of Missouri residents when it decided to shut down a stretch of Highway 40 for a period of two years. Haas said the state had a legal obligation to balance the needs of its citizens with the cost of the project.
(snip)
Haas said shutting down a major metropolitan traffic artery could violate the Federal Homeland Security Act.
Haas, who said he intends to run for the U.S. Congress, filed the motion without an attorney on his own behalf. He is asking for a permanent injunction.
What is Haas’s standing to sue? Maybe the news that “he intends to run for Congress” is a clue — the stretch of Highway 40 that will close is entirely in MO-2, which means he has to live in the district. Since none of MO-2 is in St. Louis City, if I’m right, this means he’s out of the figurative hair of the city’s body politic.
Maybe Haas thinks he can ride the frustration over 40’s closing for a year into Congress.
Sen. Jim Webb yesterday said localities and states should do what is in their best interests to address their problems with illegal aliens.
“I think it’s appropriate for state and local governments to take a position on this,” Mr. Webb, a Democrat, told The Washington Times during an interview in his Senate office.
“On the one hand, there are going to be people who don’t like that, but on the other hand, they still want us to vote for such things as the right of a local community to create a sanctuary,” Mr. Webb said. “So if a local community under our system should have the right to create sanctuaries, the local community should have the right to create restrictions when people truly are illegal.”
Sen. Webb must be reading this blog.
Eight St. Louis ACORNers have been hauled in on voter fraud, and U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway was on TV today announcing the indictments. Finally, we have a Federal prosecutorial authority in this town making something of a courageous racial stand. I suppose the child pornographers and pedophiles can wait another day.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, would allow illegal aliens to apply for permanent residency but would also require them to go back home after a “set period” of time, he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday.
After four days of questioning from Cybercast News Service, however, the Romney campaign was unable to specify how long that “set period” would be.
On “Meet the Press” Romney said: “Well, whether they go home – they should go home eventually. There’s a set period – in my view they should have a set period during which period they, they sign up for application for permanent residency or for citizenship. But there is a set period whereupon they should return home.”
Tom Tancredo jilted Duncan Hunter to endorse this???
In what may be the largest early release of inmates in U.S. history, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration is proposing to open the prison gates next year for some 22,000 low-risk offenders.
According to details of a budget proposal made available to The Bee, the administration will ask the Legislature to authorize the release of certain non-serious, nonviolent, non-sex offenders who are in the final 20 months of their terms.
The proposal would cut the prison population by 22,159 inmates and save the cash-strapped state an estimated $256 million in the fiscal year that begins July 1 and more than $780 million through June 30, 2010. The proposal also calls for a reduction of more than 4,000 prison jobs, most of them involving correctional officers.
(snip)
Under “summary” parole, offenders would remain on supervised release and would still be subject to searches by local law enforcement at any time, but they would not be returned to prison on technical violations. It would take a new crime prosecuted by local law enforcement officials to return an offender to prison.
Okay, so they’ll be on parole, but there will be no consequences for violating parole. With California’s parole and probation officers already overworked (and the state budget deficit means that it is highly unlikely that any more will be hired), adding another 22,000 cases to their collective load, combined with no consequences for violating parole, means that they will be let out of prison, but their “parole” will only be in theory. And as for the part about “taking a new crime … to return them to prison,” if California’s prisons are being emptied out now to save money, then the only way that will happen is if the new crime is a very serious one. In fact, the only crimes in California that will result in prison anymore are certain category offenses.
Another article I read about this issue stated that those who support this plan are especially glad that a Republican governor is proposing it, because if a liberal Democrat did it, Republican politicians and conservative talk radio would never let up about it. That’s how most of the liberal agenda has been adopted — by “Republican” politicians. Remember, affirmative action as a Federal mandate started under the Nixon administration.
UPDATE 12/22: EPH has the parody lyrics.
Romney has been caught in a similar lie.
There is a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about Ron Paul’s supposed links to “white supremacists.” A lot of liberal blogs are parroting the same story (as they tend to do), but even some “conservative” blogs, such as American Stinker, Little Goober Freakballs and Town Drunk, are running with this story in almost a verbatim fashion with the lib ones.
The hubbub all started because of a posting by a certain extreme right-wing landlord in Roanoke, Virginia on his website. It came to my attention because he mentioned the Council of Conservative Citizens.
This proves that all you libs and neo-cons who jumped onto this story based on the musings of that certain landlord are nothing but a bunch of rank amateurs in the “anti-hate” field. Even people of like mind with that certain landlord don’t like him, and it’s perfectly obvious that 90% of the crap on his website is deliberate s**t-disturbing agitprop. And so it is with the posting by this landlord that started the lib/neo-con feeding frenzy — I have read it, and there are several whoppers, and a whole lot of distortions. He didn’t even spell the name of the restaurant correctly, even as he claims he has attended a meeting there (which is itself dubious as Roanoke-to-Arlington in Virginia is probably about a 5-hour drive counting DC area traffic jams).
Either this landlord knows that his lies are lies, which would make him a pathological liar, or he thinks they’re the truth, which would make him clinically delusional. Either way, it does not portend well for his reputation.
The real professionals in the “anti-hate” industry, the Paranoia-Industrial Complex, the ones based in Montgomery, Alabama, have called this landlord a “coward,” (exact quote), they have implied that he engages in a lot of untruthful s**t-disturbing (not their exact words), and they don’t even rely on his agitprop. At the time of this writing, they haven’t bitten on the landlord’s post. That’s saying a lot for a “center” that itself likes to play fast-and-loose with the truth, and a lot more about liberal blogs, and neo-con ones like American Stinker, Little Goober Freakballs and Town Drunk that did bite.
AP:
Paul’s vision of the nation’s economic future is not pretty. “When empires go too far their currencies are ruined because all wars are fought through inflation,” he said. “That means the trillion-dollar operation that we have (overseas) is coming to an end. I want to bring it to an end gracefully, not wait for a dollar collapse.”
While Paul says his critics sometimes accuse him of being a good candidate for the 19th century, his campaign appears to be aided to an unusual degree by the energy and enthusiasm of supporters skilled at using the Internet to their own advantage.
You see how these two paragraphs are contradictory? If Paul is a “good candidate for the 19th century,” this must mean the “inflation” and “dollar collapse” he wants to stop must be a natural consequence of progress. It looks like RP’s liberal and neo-con critics’ “vision of the nation’s economic future” is even uglier, and has the added detriment of (what we’re supposed to think is) inevitability.
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