And They Said That Conservative Comics Would Be Bumming Under Obama — Along Comes the Former Mrs. Sonny Bono.

CNS:  Cher: Republican Rule Almost ‘Killed Me’

Married to Sonny Bono for 11 years, and it was 8 years of George W. Bush that almost did her in.  Sure.

P-D:  Is 13 the new 18?

Actually, I think it’s more like 40 is the new 13.

SEMO:  Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder says Cape has ‘great potential’ for Tour of Missouri

I would hope that a Lieutenant Governor from a certain city should advocate for that city.

KSDK:  Olympic swimmers in Chesterfield react to Phelps incident

They don’t have enough medals in order to drive drunk and smoke weed.

KSDK:  Obama poster artist arrested on graffiti charges

Hope they thought the Obama posters were the graffiti.

AP:  Report: A-Rod tested positive for steroids in 2003

It wasn’t long before that he suckered the Texas Rangers into giving him $25 million a year, so, to paraphrase Vince Lombardi, he had to do something to show that his ass was worth so damned much.

AP:  Whitney Houston makes triumphant comback at party

It was such a great night that she smoked weed at the afterparty.

USNAWR:  New SCHIP Law Gives Kids Mental Health Coverage

Do you get the feeling that just about every kid is about to come down with a mental illness?

AP:  Bugatti found in Britain gets big bucks at auction

For the $4.4 million that the 1937 Bugatti went for, you could have had two 2009 Veyrons.  Not that it’s an easy thing to get just one.

Politico:  [Barney] Frank warns of job losses

Sorry, Barn, you’re a year late and a trillion short.

Politico:  Steele: WaPo should be ashamed

“Right back at ya, Mikey.” — WaPo

SPACE.com:  Scientist: Keep Mars Pristine

From what?  The Martian coal industry?

FWD:  Celebrating Jason Wu

Who?

Accident Shmaksident

LAT:

Confidential LAPD misconduct files mistakenly posted on Internet

A clerical error is blamed for the disclosure, which violates the Police Commission’s own privacy policy, and perhaps state law.

The Los Angeles Police Commission violated its own strict privacy policy — and perhaps state law — on Friday, releasing a confidential report on the Internet that contained the names of hundreds of officers accused of racial profiling and other misconduct.

The blunder, which police officials attributed to a clerical error, marks an embarrassing misstep for a police department that has staunchly rebuffed efforts by the public to learn the identities of accused officers and gain greater access to the discipline process.

(snip)

Word of the report sent the department and commission into damage-control mode. The website was taken down within an hour while representatives from the commission and Police Chief William J. Bratton’s command staff called the president of the union that represents 9,500 rank-and-file officers to apologize.

I guess they don’t realize that there’s no such thing as unringing a bell when it comes to the internet.  And I don’t think it was an accident — I bet some black, Hispanic or white liberal employee deliberately leaked the list, because they want black and/or Hispanic gangs or thug types to murder such cops.  Not that they’ll ever tell us, but mark me:  Something bad will happen to at least one of these cops.

One Year On

Yesterday was the year anniversary of the Cookie Monster massacre in Kirkwood.  At the time, your blogmeister, while writing in another medium, paid close attention to the local media and their telling of the story, not only during the evening of the shootings, but in the days afterward.  The reason is that when something like this happen, the media will accidentally slip up and either tell you truths or imply truths that they’ll cover up later on.

And, they did just that.  From what I read on the night of the shootings and going forward a week, combined with what I already knew about Kirkwood, I was able to piece together a version of the story — Mr. Thornton was a perpetual malcontent, and Kirkwood is the kind of place that looks conservative on paper and in some election results, but on race, they’re liberal/egalitarian all the way.  For months and years, Official Kirkwood did nothing but pander to and mollycoddle Mr. Thornton, when any fair jurisdiction would have stopped giving him the time of day long ago.  The more they pandered to him, the more ostentatious and erratic his behavior became.  There was almost no way that it would have ended any differently that it did a year ago.

Also, once I made this conclusion, I predicted that Official Kirkwood would learn nothing.  Not that it was an espcially prescient thing to say, but it has indeed come true.

The P-D has these two treatments from yesterday’s rememberance:

(1)  A motley organization started in the aftermath of the shootings feted an essay contest for Kirkwood elementary school students.  Predictably, the winning essays, and probably all of them, had the Lennonite “Imagine” theme.  If any of them had brains, they would realize that this is the mentality that got them into this mess to begin with.

(2)  Todd Smith, a Kirkwoodian who was at the fateful City Council meeting a year ago, has an op-ed in the P-D blaming guns.  Not that I paid that much attention to the gun issue in the aftermath of the shootings (my mind was on the more obvious factor), but someone I know did an analysis and figured that Mr. Thornton had to violate at least five city, state and Federal laws just on the day and evening of the shootings.  Mr. Smith thinks that “microstamping” (guns already have SNs) would help cops solve crimes — need I remind everyone that the authorities in Kirkwood had no trouble solving this crime.  It’s the motive that Official Kirkwood has trouble grasping.  Guns can’t have motive.

Sebelius to HHS (Why Not DOT? She Seems to Know a Lot About Roads)

That’s the chatter.  If she goes, then Lt. Gov. Mark Parkinson, a Democrat, becomes Governor.  Parkinson is Kansas’s equivalent to Chris Koster, a longtime Republican who flipped parties a few years ago for the sake of cold pure opportunism.  Once he did that, Sebelius picked him as her running mate for her second term as Governor.

When Sebelius first ran for Governor in 2002, she made a flippant remark comparing Missouri roads to a 9/11 tragedy.  That said, I’m surprised Obama didn’t send her to DOT.

Georgia En Mi Mente

On the recent scandal with peanut butter and salmonella — we’re told that the suits deliberately concealed bad news and went on with production anyway.  But we’re not told about the other half of the coin.

I understand that the processing plant in question is in north Georgia, which happens to have a high Hispanic growth rate.  Hispanic farm workers don’t have a very good track record when it comes to hygiene.  Could it be that the other half of this coin has to do with the workers at the plant?

Just wondering.

Nothing But Dark Skies Do I See

AP:

New Zealand town is in the dark — and proud of it

TEKAPO, New Zealand – This little town is in the dark and proud of it.

Where other places greet the night by lighting up their streets and tourist attractions, this one goes the other way — low-energy sodium lamps are shielded from above, and household lights must face down, not up.

The purpose: to bring out the stars.

The town of 830 people on New Zealand’s South Island is on a mission to protect the sight of the night sky, even as it disappears behind light and haze in many parts of the world.

The ultimate prize would be UNESCO’s approval for the first “starlight reserve,” and already the “astro tourists” are coming.

I don’t know if this analogy holds for Tekapo, New Zealand, but doing this would be like turning out all the lights only in Yonkers and none in New York City, and expecting the skies in Yonkers to be completely free of light pollution.

Light pollution is measured on something called the Bortle Dark Skies Scale — on a whole number scale from 1 to 9, where 1 is the cleanest and 9 is the most light polluted.  Believe it or not, there is no place in the continental United States that has a Bortle number of 1 — even in the remotest place in central Nevada, the lights from even faraway cities like Vegas and Reno has an effect, such that 2 is the best you’re going to get.  All this, of course, assumes that the atmosphere is ideal, which it usually is not.