Aside from attempting to find a willing partner in the sin of adultery, what did U.S. Sen. Larry Craig do wrong, exactly?
Ah, that’s right. He provided Democratic partisans with talking points for miles and key opportunities to abandon even the pretense of taste or tolerance.
Handing your opponents a well-documented personal failing is perhaps the most unforgivable sin in politics.
UPDATE: A reader, apparently the person resposible for creating this image, says the following …
To catallaxy.net
The word is “hypocrite”
Just another Jesus talkin evil walkin lying hypocrite Republican Senator.
If hypocrisy were the issue, how many Senators would we have left?
Published by Caleb at August 31, 2007
in tv.
They’re done shooting (forever) … and if you’ll be in Baltimore tomorrow night, you’ll have a chance tell the cast and crew how much you love the show.
I can’t be there, but please buy Bunk and McNulty each a shot and I’ll pay you back.
This ad, at least with regard to the fiscal record of Ernie Fletcher, is pretty devastating. It manages to call Fletcher out for the single largest failure of his administration: the failure to cut spending.
Back in the old days people during rush hour had to wait in long lines in order to pay a ten cent toll. Some critics of Sen. David Williams plan to place tolls on some KY roads and bridges believe that we’ll have to hire a bunch of state employees to collect tolls and people will once again have to sit in their cars waiting to pay a toll. Good news, due to advances in technology all this can be a thing of the past.
Other states use E-ZPass. What is E-ZPass? Here’s a description from the E-ZPass Web site:
Instead of the inconvenience of coins, tokens, and tickets, E-ZPass allows you to pay tolls electronically as you pass through specially equipped toll lanes.
You can establish a prepaid E-ZPass account using your credit card, personal check, or cash. The convenient credit card payment option automatically replenishes your prepaid account. Check and cash E-ZPass accounts have a higher replenishment threshold and are replenished by mailing or delivering a payment to the E-ZPass Customer Service Center.
When you establish an E-ZPass prepaid account, you receive a small electronic tag that attaches to the windshield inside your car. Within the tag is an electronic chip that contains information about your account. Each time you use a toll facility where E-ZPass is offered, an antenna at the toll plaza reads the vehicle and account information contained in your tag. The appropriate toll is then electronically debited from your prepaid account. A record of your transactions will be included in your periodic statement.
See, that’s not so bad.
How depressing is this?
As a member of a “misunderstood minority” — a journalist — Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Clarence Page said last night that he has witnessed a great deal of history, including Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s final press conference.
After decades of epitomizing the job of “Washington Insider,” the most significant historical event in Clarence Page’s professional life is attending Thurgood Marshall’s retirement press conference? That’s it? A scheduled newser for an event that everyone widely anticipated?
I mention all of this only to get to this aside: I met Clarence Page in Washington, D.C. many years ago. When I talked to him, I said that my economics professor used some of his columns to illustrate points in class. He beamed.
I did not tell Mr. Page that my professor used his columns to illustrate the pervasiveness of economic ignorance. It would have been rude.
Kenneth Foster will not be put to death for a murder no one believed that he committed. Texas Gov. Rick Perry has commuted his sentence to life imprisonment:
Mr. Foster was arrested with three accomplices after a night’s armed robbery spree through San Antonio that ended with one of his companions gunning down a 25-year-old law student, Michael LaHood Jr. The jury convicted Mr. Foster and sentenced him to die, along with the gunman, Mauriceo Brown, finding that he should have anticipated that the group’s crimes could lead to murder.
It might be easy to praise Perry for commuting the sentence, but why praise him? It took intense media pressure for Foster to avoid death.
Mark Nickolas makes a fairly common mistake in a recent blog posting in which he blasts Kentucky Senate President David Williams for supporting a “new tax on Kentuckians — bridge and road tolls.”
Well, it’s not a tax. It’s a fee. The distinction is more than semantic.
First of all, the fee is on drivers, not Kentuckians. I would wager to say that half or more of the people who cross the Ohio River into and out of Kentucky do not, in fact, live in Kentucky. The cost is borne only by those who choose to use the bridge. To the extent that the toll is used to support only that bridge, it’s all to the good. The users of the bridge pay for the maintenance while drivers, voters and taxpayers who do not use the bridge are better off. They don’t pay for something they don’t use.
Second, supporters of transparent government - Mark says he is one - favor fees over taxes just about any ol’ day of the week. Agencies funded through fees know that raising those fees might invite questions from fee payers of how efficiently the operation runs. Fee-for-service transactions make clear to consumers of those fee-based services just how much they’re paying and what they’re getting for the money. That’s the best a good kind of T&A: transparency and accountability.
Taxpayers usually don’t have that luxury. They just pay money into a pool (the General Fund) and lawmakers pull money out of the pool to pay for stuff. Taxpayers are none the wiser about what they’re getting and what they’re paying to get it. That kind of system invites the big troublesome three: waste, fraud and abuse.
Whether or not the tolls end up paying to support only the relevant projects is an open question. It would be stupid to charge a fee on a bridge in Paducah to pay for one in Louisville. If that’s what Williams and his allies have in mind, then that’s a problem.
As to Fletcher removing tolls on a few roads, if he did so to shift the cost of road maintenance onto taxpayers, then maybe his political ambitions have once again gotten the best of him.
That kid who hacked his iPhone? He traded it for a new car and three more iPhones:
… seventeen-year-old George Hotz of Glen Rock, NJ has made the trade of the summer. Hotz traded his hacked iPhone for a new set of wheels (Nissan 350Z to be exact) and 3 more 8GB iPhones. “[Terry] Daidone, who’s the co-founder of Louisville, Kentucky-based CertiCell, has apparently also offered the young man a paid consulting job, but stresses the company doesn’t have ‘any plans on the table right now to commercialize Mr. Hotz’ discovery’.”
