I think there might be a country song in here somewhere:
HAMMOND, Ind. — Police said a man who had been drinking alcohol to celebrate his release from prison crashed his bicycle into a railroad crossing gate in northwestern Indiana.
[. . .]
Police said the man was drunk and that he told officers he had been trying to beat the train but didn't know how he wound up on the ground.
Wow -- wonder how she's gonna word that on her resume:
EVANSVILLE — A judge agreed Wednesday to push back the trial date of former Knight Township Trustee Linda K. Durham so she could look for work.
Durham, 31, was to go on trial Monday on charges of theft and official misconduct.
There was a big dogfighting bust in Indianapolis over the weekend, and that has led animal rights activists to renew their longstanding efforts to strengthen the state's animal fighting laws. Promoting or using animals for fights are felony charges. But attending the fights is a lesser offense:
Talk about a dilemma. When the left and the hard left get in a cat fight, for whom do I root?
A Democrat whose name was invoked by President Barack Obama's spokesman in an attack on the party's liberal wing says the White House doesn't understand deep public frustration over the troubled economy.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich tells ABC's "Good Morning America" that press secretary Robert Gibbs shouldn't have attacked the "professional left."
There's a new edition of Robert Heinlin's "The Puppet Masters" out (via Instapundit), and I may have to pick it up. This isn't the 1951 version of only 60,000 words. It's the 1990 version in which Heinlein was able to return the 36,000 words cut by the original publisher.
Hey, this ain't gonna be just a bar that serves food, you know, one of those joints where people wash down cheap, greasy grub with too much liquor, then throw up in the parking lot, pee on other people's cars and make so much noise the neighbors lose their minds. No sir, this will be a classy place:
Meg Whitman's plan to boost California's economy by cutting taxes and government regulations touched off debate Tuesday between liberal economists, who called it "deeply flawed" and potentially damaging to the state's economy, and conservatives who praised it as a "well-planned road map" to recovery.
Well, the Census Bureau reports that it will spend about $1.6 billion less than was budgetd to count us all this year. Woo hoo. How grateful are the starving supposed to be for this little crumb?
This works out to about 11 percent less than the $14.7 billion appropriated over 12 years for the 2010 count, and 22 percent less than budgeted for this year.
[. . .]
San Francisco is now added with Oklahoma City to my Downtowns of Infamy list. O.C. is where the parking meter was introduced back in 1935. And S.F. has come up with the latest innovation for that evil contraption:
I give you, direct from the pages of their high school yearbooks (via gawker.com), the most hottest, dynamic political couple since Marty Matalin and James Carville -- Rachel Maddow and Rush Limbaugh! Scary.
Do you know what these are?
1) jetblue flight attendant, 2) steve slater, 3) bleach episode 283, 4) lindsay sloane, 5) ind vs nz, 6) shanna mclaughlin, 7) parenthood, 8 ) dish network, 9) rachel bilson and, 10) portia de rossi.
Another school system that doesn't know when to leave well enough alone:
MOUNT OLIVE, N.J. -- Who wants to pay for "D"-quality plumbing? Fly the skies with a "D"-rated pilot? Settle for a "D" restaurant?
Certainly politicians are hypocrites. That's who they are and what they do. As a political scientist in this story about Gov. Mitch Daniels' flip-flop on federal stimulus funds says, "They've got their asterisk, but it's a flip-flop and it's convenient, and politicians always do the convenient thing.
Alert the media -- I'm going to say something nice about Jimmy Carter. And a normally libertarian-baiting writer actually has something nice to say (in an offhand way) about deregulation. The subject of both our departures: the deregulation of beer, which has given us such an explosion of brands and styles and tastes:
If a school system has to adopt a "show up or else" policy, it's a good sign things have gotten out of hand. At IPS, they plan to start firing teachers who fail to report absences or tardies, flunk students who don't show up regularly and on time, and even report parents to Child Protective Serives if their children rack up too many absences or tardies. This is how bad it's gotten:
A public intoxication charge was dropped against Indianapolis Colts reserve defensive lineman John Gill though he was obviously seriously drunk when he was picked up:
This one's going to bug me all weekend:
MADISON, Wis. — With the district in a financial crisis and hundreds of its members facing layoffs, the Milwaukee teachers union is taking a peculiar stand: fighting to get their taxpayer-funded Viagra back.
The union has asked a judge to order the school board to again include Pfizer Inc.'s erectile-dysfunction drug and similar pills in its health insurance plans.
Elena Kagan is a liberal replacing a liberal, so she's not likely to make a difference on the Supreme Court in the short term. Still, she's going to be there a long time, and we shouldn't forget what her tenure is likely to be like:
Even without Christina Romer there, Washington will still be the center of stupidity:
If you want to know why us libertarian types are skeptical of the government's ability to prevent housing market bubbles, well, I give you Exhibit 9,824: the government's new $1000 down housing program.
Some law enforcement groups want Indiana to go further than it does in restricting sales of products with ingredients used by meth cookers. Cold and allergy medicines containing pseudoephedrine are now required to be behind the counter, and there are restrictions on how and to whom it can be sold. What is proposed is that we make such products prescription only, and a proponent makes use of a good analogy:
