Let's see if I have this straight: Crime was running rampant in Indianapolis, but the members of the Marion County Sheriff's Department didn't really care; I dunno, maybe they were too busy eating donuts or sleeping in their cars. Then the Indianapolis Star did a hard-hitting expose revealing that robberies were up 18 percent. The sheriff then realized the jig was up -- "Gadzooks, the newspaper is onto us!" -- and immediately arrested nine suspects thought to be responsible for 30 robberies.
Even without the insane roadblocks created by No Child Left Behind, public educators face so many challenges in their efforts to pursue excellence. Let's hope no school in Fort Wayne ever settles for "adequate," as this school in North DeKalb County, Ga., seems to have done. (via boortz.com)
This case from Australia should give you pause, no matter which side of the abortion debate you're on.
"Whether it is better never to have been born at all than to have been born with even gross deficiencies is a mystery more properly to be left to the philosophers and the theologians," the New York Court of Appeals wrote in a 1986 decision rejecting a similar "wrongful life" claim. "The implications of any such proposition are staggering."
A nation has to control its borders, and we are not. Illegal immigration at the least threatens the cohesion of America and at worst our protection from terrorism. But ending our tradtion of birthright citizenship doesn't seem like the best solution to the problem. Our "melting pot" has already become too much of a salad bowl, and this could be the last straw.
I've blown hot and cold on the death penalty over the years. I've always been skeptical as a libertarian/conservative; we barely trust the government to pave the highways, and we're going to let it make the ultimate life-and-death decision? And every time a justifiable exception becomes entrenched -- children, the mentally retarded, (soon, I hope) the profoundly mentally ill -- the temptation becomes stronger to just call for chucking the whole thing. How many exceptions can there be before it really does become cruel and unusual to impose it on the remaining handful?
You're probably so far out of the mainstream that you don't have the intrinsic aptitude to appreciate this post. But, trust me, you'll have a thought shower in a day or two, allowing me deferred success.
Have you suspected that ads are somtimes placed in particular places for specific reasons? Check out the ad next to this "readers tell stories of quitting cigarettes" package. Trying to reinforce the message, maybe?
This is one of the scariest surveys I've read in a long time:
College students trust the United Nations more than they trust the federal government, according to survey results released Wednesday by the Harvard University Institute of Politics.
I know a lot of people are praising this woman for being brave enough to take drastic action to change her daughter's behavior. But I think the girl's reaction -- "Coretha, a soft-spoken girl, acknowledged the punishment was humiliating but said it got her attention. 'I won't talk back,' she said quietly, hanging her head." -- probably masks a seething resentment. If I were that mom, I'd be sleeping with one eye open from now on.
You'd think that UFO nuts, confronted with evidence such as this, would be embarrassed into getting real lives or at least drifting toward a different obsession. Alas, it probably won't happen.
Maybe it's been a slight exaggeration (very slight) when some of us have claimed that radical-environmentalist groups such as Earth First care far more for the planet than for its human inhabitants. It's not possible to exaggerate that sentiment for this group; its name, Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, pretty much says it all.
You may not have heard of DISH, Texas, but you can visit it, starting this week. It's part of a trend, which some find distressing, of small towns letting themselves be renamed in return for money or other considerations:
In an age of pervasive advertising that many people try to ignore, such stunts are a good way to grab the public's attention, said Mark Hughes, chief executive of Buzzmarketing and the former Half.com executive who devised the Oregon deal.
The blogosphere is changing rapidly. Recently I mentioned that we needed and probably would soon have the equivalent of a blog wire service in Indiana. Now we have one. The Indiana Blog Review, referenced in the immediately prior post, promises an attempt to round up the best from the state's major blogs. And this story describes another phase in the development of the national blogosphere.
Advance Indiana thinks Rep. Mike Pence is being a hypocrite (and an overly partisan one at that) because he says the journalists' shield law he and Sen. Richard Lugar are sponsoring would have covered journalists in the Valerie Plame case but not journalists in the CIA black-site prison story.
Maybe you saw the strange little story about the people who shot the sparrow that knocked over 23,000 dominoes during an attempt to set a world record. Now you can learn the rest of the story:
Under Dutch law, you need a permit to kill this kind of bird, and a permit can only be granted when there's a danger to public health or a crop," said agency spokesman Niels Dorland. "That was not the case."
Bumper stickers aren't philosophy, protest signs aren't dialogue, and Cindy Sheehan is not a "war critic" whose observations add to our understanding of the issue. She's a pathetic sideshow, and any "legitimate" news organization that follows her parade back to the Bush ranch over Thanksgiving should be shamed out of the business.
I probably don't care about baseball and steroids as much as I should -- their game, their rules and all that. But it's fair to say that baseball officials haven't really been serious about stopping the use of steroids, as evidenced by fines that no one took seriously. Now they are getting serious:
Now we're getting lectured by the United Nations on our social benefit systems:
High health care costs and lack of low-cost housing exacerbate poverty and this can be seen as a human rights abuse, concluded a 17-day fact-finding mission by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights Tuesday.
How much longer do we have to suffer these knaves and fools? Send the whole bunch packing.
Judge Robert Bork wasn't actually the first Supreme Court nominee to be Borked -- rejected by the Senate because of an effective smear campaign. It was Clement F. Haynsworth, way back in 1969. And Sen. Birch Bayh, father of Sen. Evan Bayh, had a major role. All things considered (including his desire to woo moderate Democrats), it will be interesting to see whether the junior Bayh follows the party line on Samuel Alito or goes his own way.
Just in case you thought college students today had given up on the struggle for equal rights:
