Current Affairs

I see the word thought police are out in force in Missouri:

Advocates for the disabled in Missouri want to strike the word "handicapped" from state laws about parking spaces.

[. . .]

What is this, the Monty Python school of risk assessment?

Fire extinguishers could be removed from communal areas in flats throughout the country because they are a safety hazard, it has emerged.

The life-saving devices encourage untrained people to fight a fire rather than leave the building, risk assessors in Bournemouth decided.

I don't believe this for a minute:

Almost half of college-aged individuals had a psychiatric disorder in the past year.

At last, a bailout I can get behind:

Seven legislators from the area served by The Bristol Press and The Herald in New Britain today wrote to the state Department of Economic and Community Development to ask for its help in preventing the closure of the newspapers.

[. . .]

This bother anybody else?

The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.

And the Mother Country calls us the uncouth, barbaric animals:

BRITISH men and women are now the most promiscuous of any big western industrial nation, researchers have found.

In an international index measuring one-night stands, total numbers of partners and attitudes to casual sex, Britain comes out ahead of Australia, the US, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany.

The multicultural apologists for America's past are tolerable as long as they just shoot their mouths off once in a while, then slink away to wallow in the guilt they so crave. But sometimes they get out of hand:

Protesters descended Tuesday on Condit Elementary School in Claremont, tersely arguing over the construction-paper pilgrim and Native American costumes worn by kindergartners at a decades-old Thanksgiving tradition. Police were called to the school when tensions rose.

This is a "Saturday Night Live" skit waiting to happen, isn' it?

After being skewered by Congress and lampooned on NBC's "Saturday Night Live," the CEOs of Detroit's three automakers may end up making their return trip to Washington by car as they seek a federal bailout.

Ouch. Zogby did a poll right after the election that found Americans don't really trust the media and that Republicans are more distrustful than Democrats -- big surprise. Here's the distressing part:

Nearly 80% of respondents consider national television news to be unreliable and 84% consider radio to be unreliable.

According to 37.6% of those surveyed, news sources on the Internet are considered to be the most reliable

Lori Drew seems like a pretty despicable person. For her part in the hoax that led a 13-year-old girl to commit suicide, she deserves eternal condemnation. But it was clear that she didn't really violate the law. She was cruel, thoughtless and heartless, yes, but not a criminal. The prosecuting attorney in Missouri said as much when he declined to prosecute. But U.S. Attorney Thomas O'Brien didn't want to let her "get away with it," so succumbed to the Al Capone/O.J. Simpson Syndrome -- if we can't get her for that, we'll get her for something.