When we make them, at least.

I guess I have no horse sense when it comes to choosing a school district to live in. First, I read that a group of spoiled high school girls are suing my formerly local high school, Glenbrook High, for disciplining them over their highly-publicized, videotaped crimes. Now, 7 years and 2023 miles later, my new local high school, Trabuco Hills, is being sued for kicking Internet swindler Cole Bartiromo off its baseball team. I guess we’ll have to figure out something before Baby Xrlq reaches high school age. [No, this isn't a veiled birth announcement. Baby Xrlq hasn't been born yet, Mrs. Xrlq isn't expecting, etc. When the day comes that I have anything like that to announce, I won't be so obtuse.]

The Daily Monopoly, which for once is actually making itself useful, has more.

It seems that Der Spiegel, a German weekly news magazine patterned after Time Magazine, may be going the way of the New York Times. As bad as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the various stupor-DMCA state bills may be, none of them are anywhere near as bad as this article makes them out to be. Parts of the article are interesting indeed, while the not-so-useful portions are so over the top as to be self-fisking. Thus, I’ll keep my comments to a minimum.

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Today I wasn’t sure what to blog about, so I took a look at the editorial page of today’s Daily Monopoly. Los Angeles Times True to form, the Monopoly did not disappoint. Not satisfied to see its big brother, the Paper With a Record fisked on the phony issue of “assault” weapons, the Monopoly saw fit to throw in its own two cents. Unfortunately, those two cents were counterfeit.

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Sugar, spice, mud, garbage, feces, underaged drinking, flimsy lawsuits, personal responsibility…

Eugene Volokh tells us about the birds and the bees. Warning: don’t try to drink any liquids while reading it.

Many have pointed to the mass graves and wondered aloud what the big deal is whether Iraq turns out to have large quantities of weapons of mass destruction or not. Here’s why. According to FoxNews, a major opposition group in Iran has WMD, as our intelligence agencies have long suspected. If our next showdown is with Iran, and we haven’t found the goods in Iraq, we’re going to look like the little boy who cried wolf. That would be especially bad if this time, there really is a wolf.

No, I’m not saying Iraq had no WMD. I’ve long assumed that they did, and haven’t given up on that yet. Nor, I might add, would I have anything against Operation Iraqi Freedom if it turned out that that was all it was about, namely freeing Iraq. That is a pretty worthy cause in its own right. But it still matters whether our intel on Iraq was correct or not, because if it wasn’t, it may come back to haunt us during Operation Iranian Freedom.

Here’s an (allegedly) real ad that was emailed to me. It looks like China’s truth in advertising laws might be a big more stringent than ours.

UPDATE: Apparently, this one is a question of bad timing, not bad advertising per se. MSNBC appears to have done much worse in that department.

The New York Times, whose new slogan appears to be “All The News That’s Fit to Print and Then Some,” is now reporting that Howell Raines has accepted the blame, sort of, for allowing Jayson Blair’s phony news stories to appear in print in recent years.

The executive editor of The New York Times told a town-hall-style meeting of newsroom staff members yesterday that he accepted blame for the breakdown of communication and oversight that allowed a Times reporter to commit frequent acts of journalistic fraud in recent months.

So far, so good. Does this mean Howell’s reign at the would-be Paper Of Record is over?

One business reporter, Alex Berenson, asked Mr. Raines if he had considered resigning, to which Mr. Raines responded that he would not step down unless asked to by The Times’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Mr. Sulzberger, who was sitting next to Mr. Raines, quickly interjected that he would not accept Mr. Raines’s resignation even if offered.

So, there we have it. In the fine tradition of Janet Reno, Mr. Raines has escaped all consequences for his own failings, simply by claiming to “accept the blame” for them. It’s too bad Blair himself didn’t think of this tactic before resigning. Oh well, I’m sure his writing skills will land him a decent gig somewhere. If all else fails, he can always write for the Daily Mirror.

This cartoon from today’s Orange County Register says just about all there is to say about
Stephen Joseph’s idiotic lawsuit to ban the sale of Oreos to children:

If this suit doesn’t earn the guy a Stella Award, I can’t imagine what will. Somebody stop this man before he litigates again!

UPDATE: AprilMay Fool! No sooner had I posted this than I read on Stefan’s favorite rag that Mr. Joseph has already withdrawn his frivolous suit. I’m not sure I buy Mr. Joseph’s explanation for this sudden about-face, however:

“We have received thousands of e-mails expressing support for what we have done in advising the public of this problem,” Joseph said. “But it’s no longer necessary to continue the lawsuit because at the time the lawsuit was filed nobody knew about trans fat. Now everybody knows about trans fat.”

Thousands of emails expressing support, eh? I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of emails he got urging him to rent a life.