Thursday, June 17, 2004

Smoke gets in your eyes

Or at least your air monitors, according to some local leaders.

Normally, I don't blog local news, but I thought this one was worth the effort. BBQ is big business in my small corner of North Carolina--we even have an entire fall festival organized around it. Lexington, NC is the self-proclaimed Barbecue Capital of the World, and rightly so in my not-so-humble opinion. The history of Lexington barbecue goes back a long way in the political history of NC--pig pickins' were held to woo voters for years before the first restaurant opened in 1919.

Some time back, the EPA *spit* informed us that our air was bad and we might suffer "regulatory consequences" (such as losing some of those precious Federal $$) because of it. Since that time, the "local leaders" (do not get me started) have been in panic mode, trying to find a scapegoat, er, reason, for the bad air. Their first attempt was a local furniture factory, but that one fell thorough when it was found to have been out of production during the sampling period. Now they have latched onto barbecue restaurants and their wood-burning pits. Needless to say, the restaurant owners are unhappy.

We'll see how this comes out. I think that when you plant the monitors in the middle of downtown, even a small downtown, you're going to get poor air quality readings. Apparently, the local leaders also think so, because they're paying to get more monitors in parts of the county that should have cleaner air. I guess they hope the EPA *spit* will take an average. Who knows?

In the meantime, if you want the consistently best barbecue in Lexington, try The Barbecue Center. Come hungry, and try to resist the temptation to order a banana split for desert. You might not survive it.

Hope for the legal system?

Maybe there is hope for the legal system after all. The jurors in the Kobe Bryant case will be allowed to question the witnesses themselves.

Perhaps this will get juries back on the track of dispensing justice, rather than asking them to blind themselves to justice and deal with "The Law" as described by a judge.

Would jury nullification be too much to hope?

This just in

Clinton Calls Infidelity 'Terrible Moral Error'

Yes, I'm weak, but I can't resist...

What was your first clue, Sparky?

My big question now is how does he feel about lying to his family, his friends and the American people when he was trying to cover it up? I'll wager he is somewhat less upset about that.

Sunday, June 13, 2004

Time to flog that dead horse again

As per usual this time of year, I've been out of touch for most of the weekend. (I came home early this weekend due to rain.) I'm noting with more than a little head-shaking a big surge in violence in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and a few other garden spots. More good men dead.

We keep trying to cut deals with the terrorists. When are we going to learn that this does not, will not and can not work? What does work is killing as many as possible and scaring the bejesus out of the rest.

By what I've seen, we don't cut deals in Afghanistan, and by all reports we don't have nearly so much trouble there. In Iraq, we keep trying to be warm and cuddly with the terrorists, and we keep getting people killed.

So when does this get through to the people running the show?

Still no evidence of WMD in Iraq

Don't you liberal fools just hate it that we just keep finding evidence that Iraq really did have WMDs? This time, your precious United Nations is saying that not only were they there, but they've been shipped to a number of places "in Europe and around the Middle East". Boy, that makes me sleep better.

I'll be the first to say that things since the war haven't been handled as well as they could have been, but at what point will you Useful Idiots just shut up about "No blood for oil" and all that crap? Or are you so addle-brained that you just can't change your minds when the evidence is right in front of your face?