BALLWIN — Extending your arm outside your car window to signal a turn or to make a one-fingered salute to your fellow drivers is now legal in Ballwin.
The Board of Aldermen voted 6-2 Monday to repeal all city ordinances that would ban extending body parts outside a car by the driver or passengers.
Aldermen Frank Fleming and Kathy Kerlagon were opposed, as was Mayor Tim Pogue.
The new ordinance is the result of a lawsuit filed last year after a motorist was cited in a road rage incident in which he made an obscene gesture to another motorist.
In related news from last night, Ballwin voted to change its name to Arnold.
New six-year tech high schools in Chicago to offer associate degrees
Five technology giants will join forces with Chicago Public Schools and City Colleges to open six-year public high schools that allow students to graduate with an associate’s degree and the expertise they need to qualify for high-tech jobs.
IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Motorola Solutions and Verizon will develop curricula, mentor students, provide summer internships and guarantee every student who completes the program a “first-in-line” job interview after graduation.
Sure, for all those jobs with those companies that only require a junior college degree. They might be “first in line” for an interview, but they’ll also be first in line for their application to be tossed into File 13. Unless the “jobs” with these companies aren’t really CSIT-STEM, but Personnel, HR, diversity enforcement, affirmative action dead weight/workfare. Yeah, that’s more like it.
“We want to hire them all. All they need to do is be able to successfully complete a curriculum through Grade 9 to 14 that’s gonna be their ticket to a good-paying job and to the middle class,” said Stanley Litow, IBM’s vice-president of corporate citizenship and corporate affairs.
Someone look behind Litow’s back to see if his fingers are crossed.
CPS officials later explained that there would be “no selective admissions criteria” for the five new high schools.
Now there’s a cracker jack plan. They’re expecting every graduate of this institution, a Chicago Public Schools institution, no less, to get a job with a tech firm that most people know by name, yet they have no entrance standards. I can really see this working out well.
The suspect had it all wrong. He could have gotten what he wanted just by coaching football. Then the boy wouldn’t have been scared and run away, he would have let the Jerry Sandusky of East St. Louis do anything he wanted to him out of fear of his future football career.
* I guess Russ Carnahan actually believes Dave Drebes’s delusional propaganda, so he’s going to challenge Clay in CD-1-D.Politico has it wrong, though — Carnahan’s residency is in what is about to be CD-1. He lives in South City, and all of the city will be in CD-1. He was thinking about moving to South County to compete as a Democrat in CD-2, though.
* Speaking of Clay. You don’t think the proceeds from those 400 and 500 percent interest rates those rent-to-own joints make don’t go unused, do you? They can buy quite a few politicians.
Though if “da communitey” were a little more creditworthy, there would be actors in that market charging much better interest rates.
* Yeah, maybe it’s the bad economy. But maybe it’s also the realization that St. Louis has plenty of domestic unassimilated Africans, and we don’t need to be importing any more.
* Amazingly, there is no objection from the state’s public campi. The University of California system won’t recognize college credits earned outside of a college environment, such as the AP. That’s because the more college credits you earn while still in high school, the less tuition money some college or university gets.
What’s going to mess this all up? If the KCPS is eliminated and the Lee’s Summit district is expanded to take in more of those Kansas City urban geniuses.
NATIONAL
* Not just black men, it’s any men. Not only are elementary schools hen houses, any small glimmer of hope that men had to gain inroads in elementary education dimmed to absolute zero and dark thanks to that freak in the LAUSD, whom I am told showed up to work wearing Richard Simmons style clothing in most days, and also according to one of his ex-students, had a jar of vaseline prominently displayed on his desk, and his hands were always busy underneath the desk.
* The good news, Mr. Fish, is that PJB is still living. He’s still writing columns, maybe has another book left in him, is still a regular on the McLaughlin Group, and the best news of all is that you don’t have to endure MSNBC in order to read or hear his insights. Though Eleanor Clift can be a little irritating.
* I don’t know what you think, but I have this Mikey Weinstein figured as a real social outcast when he was in middle and high school. Now he thinks he’s getting revenge on the rest of the world with his little “no Christianity in the military” goober group.
* Why do states want to make Shari’ah Law off limits for their legal jurisprudence? Maybe, just maybe…
* Jealousy. The opening weekend box office for Act of Valor almost doubled its entire production costs. Some of the movies that won Oscars on Sunday will never break even, counting the DVD/VOD proceeds.l
Oh, now they’re worried? So what? Why are we worried that they have to procure a fake identity to stay in the country? Don’t these people bring that much needed diversity we just can’t do without? Besides, I thought this was all our fault for not enacting comprehensive immigration reform, aka amnesty and open borders. It goes like this: They have no choice to break the law because we bigots won’t exempt them from it.
* Why I voted for Ron Paul, but I’m going to the wall for Ron Paul. The picture speaks thousands of words. And it’s a big time public relations clusterfuck.
Rahm is right. However, his former boss would direct as many Federal educational resources as possible at those students who will never amount to anything, diverting resources away from students who will or could amount to something.
* Food stamps being used to buy guns, beer and cigarettes in Ohio, specifically Cleveland. The investigation focuses on “rogue retailers,” scammy fly-by-night corner store operations. But according to one of my secret squirrel sources, the mainstream supermarket chain in Arizona, Basha’s, (think: Schnucks), is allowing food stamps to be used to buy alcohol and cigarettes.
You’ll find in this story that the authorities are worried that two-year olds are going without while their parents have smartphones and expensive purses. Duh, genius — Where do you think the two-year old came from? Welfare meal ticket.
* First off, he’s wrong. At least 3 million illegal aliens voted in the November 2000 Presidential election.
Second, of course Democrat Congressmen are going to say that there is no “problem” with illegal aliens voting. Because to them, illegal alien voting isn’t a problem, it’s a solution.
Eighth-grader Ted Phillips is athletic, artistic and gets good grades. When he grows up, he wants to be an entrepreneur, a football player, a rapper or an artist. He also wants to make enough money to buy his mom a pink truck.
How did it end? Like it usually does for every 14-year old project dwelling honor roll student that wants to be a rapper or an athlete.
* Canada is making progress, but it still has a long way to go. I fail to see the necessity of giving a father a ball check for his daughter drawing a picture of a gun.
* You’ll get the gag right away. If you’re in college and you have a prof who is into this postmodernist bullshit, hope he or she never sees this website.
MUSIC AND VIDS
The Hollies’ hottest record. Yeah, more people have heard and heard of Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress. Maybe what hurts this record is that the lyrics get lame at certain points.
BRA/Ruin Porn. No, not those “bras.”
Liberals see this video and blame deindustrialization, not enough public spending, and white racism. Conservatives see this video and blame big spending government and the “Democrat plantation.”
Sane people see this video and properly blame black social pathology and, as SBPDL puts it, Actual Black Run America.
First off, I had minor surgery yesterday that didn’t turn out to be so minor. I’m really too weak to be doing any serious blogging, but I wanted to pound the laptop at least for this thing.
Here’s the number to watch in Michigan tonight: 9.24. That is Romney’s percentage margin of victory over McCain in MI in 2008. Even if Santorum doesn’t out and outright win MI tonight, if he finishes within 9.24%, it’s a moral victory for Santorum. Too, Michigan’s delegates are distributed proportionally, so it wouldn’t be just a moral victory. Why is this important? Two words: George Romney.
Romney will win Arizona, mainly because of the strength of its organized Mormon community. McCain didn’t even win his own state’s primary with a majority in 2008, and his margin of victory over Romney was under 13%. But for McCain, Romney would have won it easily in 2008. That, and probably also Gov. Brewer’s endorsement and Kris Kobach being on the Romney team, will be why Romney wins AZ easily tonight.
* East St. Louis’s Sandusky? He was a track coach, so there is probably going to be more than just this one vic before all is said and done.
* Yes, I’m reading between the lines. I’m guessing she was a young Can’t Teach for America dingbat, who thought that she was going to be The One that finally got rid of that dastardly achievement gap.
Count me out. The prices get higher and the portions get smaller as time goes on. Not only that, the burgers don’t seem to be as good as they used to be. I haven’t eaten in one in more than four years.
* I’ll link to it, but I’ll leave the social commentary to James Edwards. We have this nice division of labor in our segment of the blogosphere: I get all the political statgeek stories, he gets Chuck-E-Cheese. I think he came out ahead in that bargain.
* This all sounds so familiar. Oh yeah, that’s right — 25 years ago, Japanese was the language of the future.
* I don’t think the school wanted to suspend her. It’s just that insurance companies have a mighty painful whip. As an asthma sufferer, she did the right thing. Yeah, there was a small chance of her having a negative reaction to that particular inhaler, but on the flip side, it’s more important to be able to breathe.
I have the hunch that the gun was never really his to begin with.
* In 1978, California voters rejected a referendum, Proposition 6, aka the Briggs Initative, which would have prohibited known homosexuals from teaching in public schools. Liberals opposed it for obvious reasons, and the the movie Milk portrays the real life Harvey Milk’s opposition. But one of the underreported stories from that time was that Ronald Reagan, who was a few years away from losing the humdinger to Gerald Ford and a few years before becoming President himself, also opposed Prop 6. His reasoning (paraphrased) was that enacting Prop 6 into law would empower the culture of J’Accuse, witch hunts, and sticking our noses where they don’t belong. Reagan’s opposition is probably the singular reason why Prop 6 didn’t even win in Orange County, the home base of the initiative’s best organized support.
* Canada is kinda on a roll. No more long gun registration, and now no more national “hate speech” laws, (though that won’t automatically reverse the provincial ones, which in some cases are more onerous than the about-to-be repealed national ones).
* No matter how well the white liberals of New Zealand treat the Maori, they’ll always bitch about “institutional racism.” If whites ever abandon NZ in one fell swoop, and the conditions for the natives return to what they were before whites arrived, the Maori will still find some way to blame whites.
* We’re coming up on a solid week of consecutive days of Afghans (read: ignorant seventh-century throwback religious fundamentalists) rioting and killing because some Korans were accidentally burned.
How do you like those Three Cups of Tea now, neo-cons?
* “BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP)—Earvin “Magic” Johnson is launching a basic cable television network targeting black viewers with positive, uplifting images of African Americans.“
This network will premier, then an hour later, it will have already showed all those positive, uplifting images. What happens next? It can’t show the same hour over and over again 24-7. After all, it’s not ESPN.
Just in case you don’t grok C&E, either — The correlation between low IQ and lots of children (if there is any) isn’t that having lots of children results in individuals in the brood having low IQs, it is that lower IQ people tend to have lots of children, who inherit their low IQ from their parents. And on the other side of the coin, successful high IQ people who were their parents’ only children aren’t high IQ because their parents only procreated once, they are high IQ because they had high IQ parents who used their intelligence to limit their fecundity, and bestowed their only child with the genetic prize of a high IQ.
You’ll find out that individual stations’ margin on gas is only a buck in 50 that people spend at the pump. Really, it’s not even 2% in my experience. The gas stations’ real money tree is the quickie mart, especially on the non-age-restricted goods.
Just as the Land of Lenin proposes to make “border region” gas prices on the level with the cheaper state on the other side of the border, they want ammo to go in the other direction.
Therefore, Illinois residents will cross the state line to buy cheaper ammo.
I swear to God, I wonder what certain Illinois legislooters use for brains.
ATTALLA, Ala. (AP) – Roger Simpson said he looked down the road and saw a little girl running outside her home but didn’t give it another thought. Police, however, said the man witnessed a murder in progress.
Authorities say 9-year-old Savannah Hardin died after being forced to run for three hours as punishment for having lied to her grandmother about eating candy bars. Severely dehydrated, the girl had a seizure and died days later. Now, her grandmother and stepmother who police say meted out the punishment were taken to jail Wednesday and face murder charges.
I wonder if Michelle Obama will be subpoenaed as a defense witness.
Yet while PPI’s research helps predict what might happen if an E-Verify system were implemented nationally, as Romney hopes, it exposes some of the less-desirable side-effects of the law as well. In Arizona, the non-citizen Hispanic workers who did stay behind increasingly shifted into a shadow economy, said Magnus Lofstrom, a co-author of the study. The self-employment rate among non-citizen Hispanics in Arizona nearly doubled post-E-Verify, and a higher proportion of people who said they were self-employed lived in poverty and lacked health insurance.
Lofstrom told Yahoo News that the informal economy would grow significantly nationwide if a national E-Verify system were established. While illegal immigrants in Arizona were able to move to other states to find work, their choices would be significantly limited if E-Verify were implemented nationally; the only real (and unlikely) option would be to for undocumented workers to move to another country. In other words, we’d be much more likely to see an increase in informal employment rather than a massive movement among illegal immigrants to “self-deport.”
(snip)
Another snag with instituting a national E-Verify program is that the current system cannot detect identity fraud. A 2009 government-commissioned study found that E-Verify only flags illegal immigrants half the time, because it can’t detect when a worker is using documents that belong to someone else. (Employers enter in Social Security or alien registration numbers, birthdates and names of employees into the database, which figures out whether they match the federal immigration and Social Security databases.) To combat this fraud, Romney has said he supports biometric ID cards for immigrants that would contain a fingerprint or other identifying device that clears them for work. Romney hasn’t explicitly said that every person in America should have this card–an idea that many libertarians object to. But without being adopted universally, undocumented people could still use false documents. (The Romney team had not responded to requests for comment from Yahoo News by the time this article was published.) Mandatory national ID cards have played a starring role in failed bipartisan immigration reform proposals in Congress over the past few years.
Here’s a parallel analogy: We don’t want convicted felons to own firearms, so we pass laws prohibiting them from owning guns, and then pass mandates for licensed dealers to do background checks. An unintended consequence is the creation of a black market in firearms, fueled mostly by residential burglaries and to a lesser extent straw purchases. I guess we’re not supposed to have or enforce felon-in-possession laws or background check mandates, Miss Goodwin?
Why bother? According to my secret squirrel source, there is de facto no real punishment for illegal aliens in Los Angeles that drive without licenses and/or drive unregistered vehicles.
Answer: Chief Beck’s boss is Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, amnesty and open borders all the way.
This means that the “worst of the worst” will be shipped back to typical prisons, thereby giving them more opportunity to rape white prisoners, assault those prisons’ guards and staff, and brutalize civilians of the nearby towns if/when they escape.
I really haven’t made up my mind about tolling I-70. However, if tolls are the only way that it will ever be widened, then I’m for them and will pay it. I’ll say the same about I-44, too. The drags on both 70 and 44 in rural Missouri are getting more and more like restrictor plate racing.
Ron Leone, executive director of the Missouri Petroleum Marketers & Convenience Store Association, said that his group opposes tolls on I-70 and that they should be subject to a public vote.
As you know, I was the manager of a small chain of gas stations through most of 2010. One of those stations was in Columbia close to an I-70 exit, and another was in Rolla close to I-44. I can’t figure out what particular grind the Association has against tolls — I don’t see highway exit gas stations being hurt or helped whether there are or aren’t tolls. Maybe they figure that some people will steam at Missouri having tolls on 70, and boycott Missouri gas until they get to Illinois or Kansas. Problem is, both states’ pump prices are more expensive than Missouri, so that strategy is only cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. If 44 in Missouri is ever tolled, then that argument wouldn’t hold water because 44 in Oklahoma is also toll.
Here’s an interesting nugget:
St. Charles County Executive Steve Ehlmann, through a representative, urged the panel to end the tolled section of I-70 west of Wentzville — and possibly outside that county altogether.
How Machiavellian of him. Put the first westbound tollbooth at the St. Charles-Warren county line, so that 70 is free in all of St. Charles County, but the tolls start in Warren County to serve as a de facto barrier to urban sprawl, thereby containing as much of it as possible in St. Charles County.
Really, if there are going to be tolls on 70, the first WB booth should be west of Warrenton, and on the other side of the state, the first EB booth should be in far eastern Jackson County.
The down side? If the statewide toll is $10, as some speculate, and your car gets 25 highway miles to the gallon, it would be an effective $1.31/gallon gas tax to drive from I-470 in Independence to I-64 in Wentzville, if that is indeed the tolled section. Ironically, the more fuel efficient is your vehicle, the higher an effective per-gallon gas tax would be this toll.
Sorry, Ron Paul. The border fence is NOT a “waste of money.”
$3 million a mile seems expensive. But that means < $6 billion for the entire USA-Mexico length.
In 2009 alone, the Federal and state governments collected $4.35 billion in excise taxes and business taxes relating to the firearms and ammunition industry. Of course, not all of those were Federal taxes, but I bet that the Feds could pay for the whole border fence with two years’ of gun and ammo taxes and firearms industry business taxes, and still have enough left over to bribe a dictator or three.
The cost of living in a democracy is tolerating moral judgments we don’t always like. For those who object, there’s a clear alternative. Protesting the Mexican-American War in the 1840s, Henry David Thoreau withheld his taxes with the understanding that he would have to go to jail for his principles. In reality, he only served one night in jail, but he was willing to pay the price for his convictions. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela paid a much higher price for theirs.
Let’s see what our society would look like if we all had the luxury of imposing our unfettered will. At a minimum, the Catholic bishops and employers resisting contraceptive coverage should be willing to pay for the care of all those unwanted children. Or perhaps they’d be willing to spend some time in jail in protest. At my taxpaying expense, of course.
What she really means:
Hispanics are procreating too much. Yeah, we thought we would love them, because we all thought they would be good little slightly tanned white liberals who cleaned our McMansions and tended their landscapes for low wages and never complained, and also vote Democrat. But we sorta got punk’d. Therefore, it’s all the Catholic Church’s fault for not giving them free contraceptives and aborticides, therefore the entire priesthood should go to jail.
I contend that this manufactured contraception NONtroversy should be taken as a clue that Obama’s internal polling numbers versus a generic Republican or any of the named remaining competitors are really bad, that the “close race” stuff for public consumption is all bullshit. If Obama were really very close to, tied with, or had a narrow or above the margin of error lead over a generic or real Republican, there’s no way he and his political and media sycophants would be trying to infuriate the Catholic Church. When the hornets are asleep, you don’t poke sticks into the nest. Therefore, the only thing I can conclude is that Obama is really way behind, and anticipates being way behind for most of the season, and is throwing this anti-Catholic Hail Mary (no pun intended) out of pure desperation, and for fund raising — Rush said yesterday his precious gigabuck SuperPAC only has $58,000.
Cameras, ID Tags Part Of New East St. Louis Public Housing Safety Plan
Five months in the making, a new set of security measures for East St. Louis Housing Authority properties was unveiled Wednesday by U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and St. Clair County State’s Attorney Brendan Kelly.
“We’re going to put in place starting in the next few months security cameras,” Durbin announced during a mid-morning press conference outside the Orr Weathers Senior High Rise at Missouri Ave. and 14th Street. “So we can monitor those coming and going and have the information necessary to keep these places safe.”
In addition, a system involving photo I.D. tags for residents will be instituted “so that those who shouldn’t be hanging around will be leaving, or if they don’t, charged with trespass,” Durbin explained.
(snip)
Durbin used that story to renew his call for East St. Louis mayor Alvin Parks to enforce the 1 am cutoff for liquor store sales, something the Senator called a “contributing factor” in the growing number of violent crimes.
Sure, because East St. Louisans who have signed leases to live in public housing projects and buy booze at 12:59 AM never cause any trouble. I mean, those Drug & Gun Free Zone signs really worked wonders.
This is the Texas’s famous “Top Ten Percent” system, the system that then-Gov. George W. Bush helped implement. That means that the 5th best student in a graduating class of 40 at a hypothetical Metro High School-style institution in Dallas doesn’t get into the University of Texas at Austin, while the 40th best student in a graduating class of 400 at Taco High School on the formerly “American” side of the sewage canal does get in.
I think this will be a very tough nut to crack for our side. Honestly, if I were on SCOTUS, I would probably have to rule for the state, because I can’t think of any good Federal Constitutional grounds on which to knock it down. Even though I know the racial perfidy of it all, and believe me, I would acknowledge that in bold-italics-underline with my written opinion.
This might end up being a 9-0 for Texas. Here’s the rub: We know the libs will rule for Texas. But because there are no real legitimate Federal Constitutional grounds to knock it down, none of the four conservatives (Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts) will find for Miss Fischer. The only possible grounds are “disparate impact,” but conservative jurists deplore that reasoning, and I don’t think they would start now just because the tables are sorta turned. Only liberal judges use it and make rulings based on it, in regards to police and firefighters’ exams, and what not. Ginsburg-Kagan-Sotomayor will find for Texas, consistency be damned.
I had eight newsy posts today, but I couldn’t work a musical segue into any of them, so I better do my DJ thing in a separate post.
This was from about the same time as Top Gun, and since Kenny Loggins had the most popular song from the TG soundtrack, and this song has lyrics that suggest being airborne, a lot of people assume that this song is also from TG. It is not — It’s really from Stallone’s worst movie, about how he drives a truck and has an estranged 12-year old son. At one point, he lets the kid drive his truck. But that’s about all I remember from Over the Top.
Speaking of TG:
Oh, the tales that guys now in their mid-40s could tell about joining the Air Force after seeing TG, who expected to fly MiGs, but wound up being medics, or sweeping tarmacs in July.
And now, her:
Yeah, they’re still pressing new releases on vinyl. Really, I think Adele’s schtick really lends itself to good virgin vinyl plus a new stylus plus a direct drive turntable plus quality amps plus quality speakers. You’ll really be able to feel the jilted lover. Unfortunately for her, as RJP said, her schtick won’t lend itself to a long sustained musical career.
Hyun responded that Floyd was a “subhuman, ungrateful APE,” and then started spreading vitriol about the black community in general. She insinuated that Whitney Houston’s recent passing wasn’t such a loss because of “all that baggage” she came with, and referred to African-Americans as “disgusting, violent, arrogant, and stupid.” Then, in an even more frightening twist, she repeatedly called for the eradication of the entire black race.
Gee, where would anyone get silly ideas like these? The rest is even hotter.
Anyone with three working brain cells deduced that Felt’s motivation for singing to Woodward was that he was mad about Nixon standing him up when he thought he was the obvious replacement for Hoover as FBI Director, the moment that Felt outed himself and Woodward confirmed a few years ago. It’s one of the seven deadlies, plain as day even to morons.
Where this goes wrong:
It wasn’t until 2005, when nearly every senior official of the Nixon White House was dead and Deep Throat himself was disappearing into the mists of Alzheimer’s disease, that the reporters revealed that he was Felt. Even then, Woodward insisted Felt’s motives were pure, that he was a freedom fighter in “a war — organized, well-practiced and well-funded by President Richard Nixon — a war aimed at the system of justice. Mark’s great decision in all this was his refusal to be silenced. He was a truth-teller.”
As I recall, Felt outed himself. If the reporters did the work, it’s probably because Felt gave them the go-ahead. And I don’t think the timing as magnanimous and altruistic, waiting for “everyone else” to kick off — I think Felt was waiting for the statue of limitations to run out, because he knew he was illegally leaking material that was gathered as part of a confidential FBI investigation.
For a long time, a lot of people fingered PJB as Deep Throat. The only problem with that theory is that PJB’s Achilles Heel through most of his professional life was his insane and blind loyalty to the political party that did everything it could to toss him out on bum and baggage. Remember, PJB is a D.C. native, but his first journalism job was with the Globe here in STL, not with any D.C. paper, especially not the Post. I can ill imagine that PJB, loyal to the Republican Party to a fault, wouldn’t want to turn against his party on behalf of people working for a paper that wouldn’t have considered hiring him out of J-school, such that he had to move away from his native city where he had spent his whole life, and a third of the way across the country.
Not so long ago, many conservative theoreticians, including the organization which assembled this graph and the underlying report, would have called this a feature, not a bug. And some of their policies have resulted in this.
The more people for whom April 15 is just another day, the less important a wise tax policy is to the body politic.
