Move over, Chicago. You’ve got nothing on Baltimore. So you let dead people vote in your elections? That’s nothing. Baltimore lets dead police officers issue traffic citations.

Under Maryland law, a traffic citation issued to the owner of a motor vehicle “caught” by a stoplight or speed camera must contain a sworn statement signed by a police officer stating that the officer has studied the camera images and that the vehicle was in violation of the law. Last week, WBAL-TV News discovered that some 2,000 stoplight camera citations were issued over the signature of an officer who was dead at the time of alleged violations.

The officer who had “signed” the citations was Baltimore City Police Officer James Fowler, who was killed in a traffic accident back in September. The problem came to light because someone who received one of the citations — for a violation that allegedly had occurred last month — showed it to a retired city police officer who had once worked with Fowler.

A police department spokesman said the problem was caused by a “computer glitch” and blamed it on the private contractor that operates the cameras. He said the department “does not blanket approve citations”. I don’t know whether he realizes it or not — or maybe he just thinks the rest of us are too stupid to realize it — but those two statements are contradictory. If a “computer glitch” was responsible, then the officer who really reviewed the citations should have caught the error. That is, if an actual, flesh-and-blood officer really did review the citations. Read more »

A couple of weeks ago I was watching Hardball on MSNBC, and Chris Matthews — you know, the guy who feels a thrill running up his leg when he hears Barack Obama speak — was waxing nostalgic about the warm, fuzzy friendship his boss, the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill had with Ronald Reagan. I almost swallowed my Glide. (I should explain: the only reason I was watching Hardball was to have something to keep my eyes and ears occupied while I was flossing my teeth.)

Matthews, to put it charitably, has a very selective memory. Here is what Tip O’Neill said publicly about Ronald Reagan on one occasion:

The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood.

And that’s just one of the milder things that was said about Reagan. Before and during his Presidency, and even after he left office, Reagan was regularly and savagely attacked by liberals and the news media. To hear them talk back in the day, Reagan was not only evil, he was stupid too. Even some Republicans, such as Henry Kissinger and Kevin Phillips, often spoke of him with barely concealed contempt.

In fact, the Left, the news media, and — before he won the Republican Presidential nomination — the GOP establishment too, treated Reagan pretty much the same way they treat Sarah Palin today. Reagan’s spoiled-brat youngest son, Ron, who has been going around promoting a book about his father, sees nothing in common between Palin and the 40th President. But then, how would he know? By his own choice, little Ronnie was estranged from his father during the latter’s White House years — he didn’t even invite his parents to his wedding. Read more »

If we’re lucky — if we’re very lucky — we’ll end up with something other than a radical Islamist government in Egypt, a government that does not make visceral hatred of the United States and a burning desire to destroy Israel the centerpiece of its foreign policy.

And, yes, “luck” is the operative word here. There is no way to predict the ultimate outcome of the street revolution in Cairo. The U. S. government is completely powerless to affect its direction. About the only thing that seems certain at this point is that Hosni Mubarak’s time as our man in Egypt is up.

Mubarak is not the first unpopular foreign dictator the U. S. has backed. As far back as 1939 Franklin D. Roosevelt, when questioned about his support of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García, reportedly answered, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

In fact, the U. S. has backed quite a few sons of bitches since then, and, almost invariably, our support for these dictators ends up causing us problems. When a crisis such as the present one in Cairo arises, we are damned no matter what we do. If we stand by our man, we incur the wrath of the people he oppresses; if we abandon him, we reveal ourselves as faithless allies and cowards — and his former subjects still hate us. Read more »

Aha! The lamestream media has caught Sarah Palin committing another Palinism!

In his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Obama invoked the Sputnik, the artificial satellite the Soviet Union launched into orbit October 4, 1957, to justify new government spending programs (which he called “investments”):

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t even there yet. NASA didn’t exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.

This is our generation’s Sputnik moment. Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race. And in a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal. We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology — (applause) — an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.

Sarah Palin went on Fox News Channel’s “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren” the following night and challenged Obama’s Sputnik analogy:

. . . he needs to remember that what happened back then with the former communist USSR and their victory in that race to space, yes, they won, but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union. Read more »

According to the grand jury indictment, it was a regular house of horrors:

The clinic reeked of animal urine, courtesy of the cats that were allowed to roam (and defecate) freely. Furniture and blankets were stained with blood. Instruments were not properly sterilized. Disposable medical supplies were not disposed of; they were reused, over and over again. Medical equipment — such as the defibrillator, the EKG, the pulse oximeter, the blood pressure cuff — was generally broken; even when it worked, it wasn’t used. The emergency exit was padlocked shut. And scattered throughout, in cabinets, in the basement, in a freezer, in jars and bags and plastic jugs, were fetal remains. It was a baby charnel house.

Sounds like one of those back-alley abortion mills women who wanted to exercise their reproductive rights were forced to go to back in those bad old days before Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion safe, legal and rare. At least, that’s the narrative.

But wait a minute. Roe was handed down 38 years ago. This indictment was handed down just last week by a Philadelphia grand jury after an investigation lasting nearly a year. You mean Roe didn’t make abortions safe, legal and rare?

Nope, it just made them legal. For any reason. At any time.

As for the clinic that was subject to the grand jury report, the paragraph quoted above is the least of it. According to the indictment, the doctor who operated this clinic “regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy — and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors.” And the women who got these “abortions” didn’t fare much better. Read more »