Politics and other nightmares

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.

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.

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:

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:

Think he'll pick the chick?

Public Access Michiana Inc. wants a share of cable franchise fees collected by South Bend so it can bring back Channel 99, the public accesc channel they once had there. Fort Wayne gets a good mention:

Sinking ship. Rats:

Christina Romer, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has resigned her post to return to her old job as an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, the White House said Thursday. Her resignation is effective Sept. 3.

[. . .]

Our government at work: When the Kindle DX -- the larger one about the size of a legal pad -- came out, one of its envisioned uses was for textbooks. College students could save hundreds of dollars in fees and not have to lug all those books around. So Amazon decided to try that idea out, creating a polot program to give Kindles to students at a few universities. Enter the Department of Justice: