A life theme

Scott Adams gives us an example of a life theme.

If your name is Kennedy, you might have good luck with love and money and power, but bad luck with transportation. Stay away from PT boats, convertibles in Dallas, cars in rivers, and small aircraft. That's a theme.

I thought it was funny.

Parking tickets

The parking ticket twits in Corpus Christi, TX drive around the downtown streets in unregistered electric golf carts.

If you lived in Corpus and tried to use one of those to save gas money on your grocery store trips you'd end up in jail eventually (after the 4th or 5th ticket).

But cops are special, laws don't apply to government agents raising revenue for the state.

My mother never told me

Some Oakland cops are trying to anew defense for their criminal behavior -- their training never included specific instruction that it's wrong to sign a false affidavit to present to a judge and that it's wrong to intentionally violate the 4th amendment.

Will better training really solve this problem?

Starvation on $1.10 per day.

It seems there's a sheriff in Alabama that's making money from providing frugal (very frugal) diets for jail residents.

When I first read about it my reaction was that the sheriff is a bad guy. That's pretty much my initial reaction to any cop – that he's a bad guy.

It seems the State of Alabama gives $1.75 per inmate per day to sheriffs to feed inmates and they allow the Sheriff to keep any money left over after the inmate meals are paid for.. That's a pretty good deal for the sheriff, not so good for the county prisoner under the care of the Sheriff.

The meals he provided were typically things like

... a few spoonfuls of grits, part of an egg and a piece of toast at breakfast, and bits of undercooked, bloody chicken at supper. … a typical inmate lunch here: “Two peanut butter sandwiches, with small amounts of peanut butter, chips, and flavored water.”

Doesn't sound very appetizing but does that sound like a starvation diet? It doesn't to me. As much as I'd like to think there's some slimy Sheriff in Alabama, the actual diets don't look all that terrible to me.

The idea of feeding inmates on $1.10 just seems on its face to be a starvation diet to most people. But, it's not.

Using 1989 price data, one recent (2001) study used a linear programming model to determine a nutritional diet that would feed an adult mail for $1.13 per day. If our Alabama Sheriff can get USDA surplus peanut butter and powdered eggs and can make bread from USDA surplus flour then he can certainly do a few cents better than the market price minimum cost diet.

Althouse thinks it was the judge who was abusive by sending the Sheriff to jail. She might be right.

Indefensible just thinks the whole thing is amazing.

Throw all the bums out

The US Senate is corrupt. All of them are corrupt, completely corrupt. All you have to do is look at the current nonsense about the Governor of Illinois appointing a replacement Senator and compare that to the current nonsense about the Governor of New York appointing a replacement Senator.

The difference in the two processes has nothing to do with high minded ethical considerations but does have everything to do with money. It's about money, it's always about money, and it's always corrupt.

Reid is afraid that Burris won't be able to raise enough money to support an election. But he's confident that Caroline will.

It's really that simple. It has nothing to do with race or corruption.