Politics and other nightmares

Congratulations to the City Council. It got this one right:

A gas station and mini-strip mall appear to be on their way to the south side of downtown Fort Wayne after City Council approved the rezoning of about two acres at 3230 Fairfield Avenue.

So, next year, Mark Souder is going to face a primary challenge from somebody running to his right:

. . . to hear Phil Troyer tell it - it's time to lower the curtain on a supposedly conservative politician who has forgotten his roots.

Is Mark Souder, who just this week blasted a possible government takeover of the health care industry, really a liberal? Troyer, who announced his candidacy for Souder's 3rd District congressional seat, seems to think so.

Is Elkhart noisier than all other Indiana cities, or are they just obsessed about the issue?

Drivers in the northern Indiana city of Elkhart may want to think twice about pumping up the volume on their car stereos.

The city is aggressively enforcing its noise ordinance, which carries a fine of up to $2,500 for repeated violations. More than 1,100 citations have been issued so far this year.

Ah, those crazy Californians, they just kind of make up the law as they go along:

Jenny Kephart, the woman with the "How dare you not do your duty to keep me from hurting myself" lawsuit, keeps plodding along, and her case against the casino that took her for $1 million will be heard by the Indiana Supreme Court. UPI dug up a professor who says there must be something about the case that distinguishes it from similar cases in which the casinos have won. But it sounds like the same old "everybody's fault but mine" argument to me:

I suspect this is one of those cases in which the city feels it has to fight to the bitter end in fear of setting some kind of precedent. God knows what trouble in might get in if it got the reputation of being soft on back-pay issues. But it does not seem to be in a very sympathetic situation:

19-year old Alison Lesch of Auburn faces a preliminary charge of attempted murder for putting her hours-old newborn daugher in a garbage bag and leaving her in a Dumpster. It is being suggested that she could have avoided the whole unpleasantness of being arrested if she had just been thinking clearly:

Have I missed something?

Anti-abortion Democrats have reignited the national abortion wars with their victory Saturday on an amendment to House health care legislation that would prevent women from obtaining abortions through government-sponsored insurance or any plan that receives government subsidies.

I swear, I can't leave you people alone for a second. I take one little week off, then come home to discover no one has killed cap and trade or health care reform yet. In fact, the march toward statism is so far along I wonder if the whole concept of freedom is starting to sound like just a rightwing rant.

It's not absolute, but we have something called the "American bystander rule." (pdf file) In the United States in general, we do not have have a legal duty to intervene if someone else is in danger (regardless of whatever moral duty we might or might not have). Would we be better served with something like the Good Samaritan rule in Europe and some jurisdictions here that requires intervention, at least of the level of reporting a crime?