BREAKING NEWS: The News-Sentinel and Knight Ridder's share of Fort Wayne Newspapers have been purchased by Ogden Newspapers Inc., a fourth-generation, family-owned group headquartered in West Virginia. I don't know much about them yet, but here's a link to their Web site.
Right Wing News, a blog that, as you might expect, worries about Republicans losing the White House, rates the 10 most dangerous Democrats, based on their electability. Evan Bayh comes in third, behind Mark Warner and Bill Richardson, just ahead of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore and way ahead of John Kerry and John Edwards. But the assessment is based on the belief that Bayh is a "moderate senator," so take it for what it's worth.
I've been pretty critical of President Bush of late, so here's a more positive assessment of his performance:
Britain's oldest surviving war veteran has celebrated his 110th birthday at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne.
Henry Allingham was presented with a letter of good wishes from the Queen by Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown at the five-star seafront hotel.
[. . .]
In the past Mr Allingham has put the key to his old age down to "cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women".
It's not just Republicans. It's not just Democrats. A congressional culture has developed in which these people live in a separate reality:
Over a 5½-year period ending in 2005, members of Congress and their aides took at least 23,000 trips — valued at almost $50 million — financed by private sponsors, many of them corporations, trade associations and nonprofit groups with business on Capitol Hill.
Oh, please. If you just get mad, you have a bad temper. But if you get mad -- unreasonably so -- often enough, you can have Intermittent Explosive Disorder, your very own disease:
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that what this patron of the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library says is true:
They needed a study for this?
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Teenage girls commonly have sex not because they want to, but because they feel pressured into it - and the result may be a higher risk of sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy, a new study suggests.
The last time I said something mean about Barry Manilow, I was roundly thrashed by members of his international fan club, who will apparently let no slight stand. A woman in England wrote, "Children, calm down there is no need to throw your toys out of the pram just because people love the Manilow."
Maryland has a fully professional medical-examiner system, so of course a body could never be misidentified there:
A child who died in a car crash was misidentified as his younger brother, a mistake that his relatives discovered a week after the accident, state police said Monday.
Troopers confirmed that the boy who died in the May 29 crash was 7-year-old Christian Marshall and not his 4-year-old brother, Justin.
A school with no rules finds that kids without rules=discipline problems. Boy, who saw that one coming?
Now, in a new book, its current head, Zoe Neill Redhead, the founder's daughter, reveals the school is having to adopt a more disciplinarian tone towards its current pupils, who have been so pampered by their parents, she says, that they no longer know the boundaries of acceptable behaviour.
Why is the fact that the Supreme Court is hearing fewer cases seen as a problem? "Supreme Court Faces Shortage of Cases," the headline says, and:
Justices are running well behind in filling their argument calendar for the term that begins in the fall. They have accepted 18 cases, compared with 27 by this time last year and 32 in 2004.
Many of the cases they have agreed to consider are technical rather than potentially groundbreaking.
Approximately one in three drivers said they usually do not stop for pedestrians in crosswalks. At least one out of five drivers did not know that pedestrians in a crosswalk have the right of way. At least one in five also did not know that roads are most slippery when it first starts to rain after a dry spell.
Letter to the editor in The Journal Gazette calling tasers "deadly weapons" and saying Wells County police were wrong to use one in a specific case. (The letter writer goes on to criticize the sheriff for trying the case "in the court of public opinion," like, oh, you know, the letter writer is doing.)
Thank God this was just a simple error of calculation:
The city of Indianapolis has been shortchanged as much as $19 million due to a mistake in calculating Indiana's alcohol excise tax.
I'd hate to think people in Indiana are actually drinking that much less.
Now, see what that evil Mitch Daniels has started. Here's another disposal of precious infrastructure assets to a foreign company. Why, this is just . . .
. . . Oh, wait. It's a Candadian company, selling rail lines it owns, in Indiana. To the Indiana Rail Road Co.
Never mind.
Here it comes, the predictable use of the victim-identification mixup to push for replacement of elected coroners with appointed medical examiners. But the mistakes that were made really have nothing to do with our coroner system, as the editorial admits:
Oh, yeah, this is a really smart platform for Indiana Democrats in the fall election:
If President Bush is trying to shore up his dismal poll numbers by "getting back his base," I'd have thought there might be something in there to please me, too. Things like fiscal restraint, a serious attempt to protect the border, recommitting to federalism instead of proposing new national initiatives. But, nooooo. This is his idea:
Ah, shallow politicians with simplistic answers:
New York, you've got nothing on Lawrence.
New York state made national headlines four years ago for becoming the first state to ban motorists from using cell phones. But a proposed cell phone ban in Lawrence would be tougher than that law or any other cell phone ban in the country, a national group that studies cell phone usage said.
