Space tourism!

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080728181832.5lx2cazr&show_article=1

'Chicago is legendary inside the FBI'

National Public Radio reported last week on the Nunezes, a family of Ohioans who are mostly "unemployed and rely on government assistance and food stamps." Times are so tough that "they cut back on expensive items like meat." In a way, this is an ideal story for radio, since a photograph accompanying the Web site version presents a visual problem. The two Nunez woman portrayed in the photo do not, to put it delicately, appear to be starving, a fact that has provoked lost of catcalls from bloggers.

But c'mon, guys, give the ladies a break. The NPR story notes that instead of meat, "they eat a lot of starches like potatoes and noodles." The previous day, the
Associated Press reported on a new study that found the Atkins diet was more effective in promoting weight loss than traditional low-fat regimes. Less meat, more carbs: ipso fatso.

Judith Flint: Heroine or Jerk?

It's a classic case of the little guy--or, in this case, gal--standing up to authority, at least the way the Associated Press describes it in a dispatch from Randolph, Vt.:
Children's librarian Judith Flint was getting ready for the monthly book discussion group for 8- and 9-year-olds on "Love That Dog" when police showed up.
They weren't kidding around: Five state police detectives wanted to seize Kimball Public Library's public access computers as they frantically searched for a 12-year-old girl, acting on a tip that she sometimes used the terminals.
Flint demanded a search warrant, touching off a confrontation that pitted the privacy rights of library patrons against the rights of police on official business. . . .

Investigators did obtain a warrant about eight hours later, but the June 26 standoff in the 105-year-old, red brick library on Main Street frustrated police and had fellow librarians cheering Flint.
"What I observed when I came in were a bunch of very tall men encircling a very small woman," said the library's director, Amy Grasmick, who held fast to the need for a warrant after coming to the rescue of the 4-foot-10 Flint. . . .
The missing girl, Brooke Bennett, turned up dead a week later. Her uncle Michael Jacques, a convicted sex offender, has been charged with kidnapping her. "Authorities say Jacques had gotten into her MySpace account and altered postings to make investigators believe she had run off with someone she met online," the AP reports.
The cops were in the library that day "chasing a lead that she had used the computers there to arrange a rendezvous":
"The lead detective said to me that they need to take the public computers and I said 'OK, show me your warrant and that will be that,'" said Flint, 56. "He did say he didn't need any paper. I said 'You do.' He said 'I'm just trying to save a 12-year-old girl,' and I told him 'Show me the paper.' "
A Vermont law that requires librarians to demand court orders in such cases had not yet gone into effect, so Flint was acting on her own discretion in demanding a warrant. The cops yielded and obtained a warrant eight hours later.
Grasmick, and by extension the AP, depicts the police as bullies picking on "a very small women." To our mind her smallness is not just a matter of physical stature. Presented with an opportunity to help a little girl in danger, she officiously responded: "Show me the paper."
Far from bullying her, the cops--although they were bigger and more numerous than she--deferred to her, slowing the investigation by crucial hours in order to comply with her demand. You can describe their treatment of her as impressively chivalrous or as excessively obeisant. In either case, it was far from domineering.

Flint, of course, would claim that she was standing up for a principle--for, in the AP's words, "the privacy rights of library patrons." Have you noticed, though, how the people who assert this principle are never patrons but always librarians?...
Here is a case in which police searching for a missing girl were forced to waste precious time because a bureaucrat, acting on her own authority, said "Show me the paper" instead of "How can I help?" Judith Flint is no heroine.

Zerzan on NPR

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/07/21/speculation_bill/

Pizza clerk surprised to find robber is her dad
Thu Jul 17, 8:18 PM ET

Police said they will not file charges against a clerk whose parents and husband were charged with robbing the pizza restaurant where she worked, officials said. Police said the clerk didn't know they planned to rob the Pizza Patron Friday night.
While the robbery was in progress, the clerk discovered her father was the robber when another clerk struck him, knocking him out and knocking off his wig and sunglasses. He was later apprehended after witnesses followed the getaway pickup.
"Her husband told us she didn't know. He knew they were going to rob someplace but he thought it was going to be a convenience store," police Sgt. James Brett said in a story in Monday's online editions of the Denton Record-Chronicle.
A surveillance video corroborated the clerk's story. A police report shows the trio was in custody within 14 minutes of the robbery.
All three suspects were charged with aggravated robbery.

Washington Post Goes Off the Obama Reservation
A surprising editorial at the Washington Post actually notices that Barack Obama’s Iraq policy is, and I quote, “irrational.”

BARACK OBAMA yesterday accused President Bush and Sen. John McCain of rigidity on Iraq: “They said we couldn’t leave when violence was up, they say we can’t leave when violence is down.” Mr. Obama then confirmed his own foolish consistency. Early last year, when the war was at its peak, the Democratic candidate proposed a timetable for withdrawing all U.S. combat forces in slightly more than a year. Yesterday, with bloodshed at its lowest level since the war began, Mr. Obama endorsed the same plan. After hinting earlier this month that he might “refine” his Iraq strategy after visiting the country and listening to commanders, Mr. Obama appears to have decided that sticking to his arbitrary, 16-month timetable is more important than adjusting to the dramatic changes in Iraq.
...
“What’s missing in our debate,” Mr. Obama said yesterday, “is a discussion of the strategic consequences of Iraq.” Indeed: The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war’s outcome — that Iraq “distracts us from every threat we face” and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That’s an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world’s largest oil reserves. Whether or not the war was a mistake, Iraq’s future is a vital U.S. security interest. If he is elected president, Mr. Obama sooner or later will have to tailor his Iraq strategy to that reality.