It cost Orange County $160,000 to rescue two campers from Trabuco Canyon last spring. Should we bill risk takers when they need to be rescued? My suggestion is to require hikers, climbers, boaters, divers, etc. to buy rescue insurance policies which would spread the costs over a large pool of risk takers.
In 2003, Congressman Darrell Issa of San Diego spent $1.6 million of his own money on the recall of Grey Davis. He didn’t think far enough ahead, and we got Governator Arnold. Apparently he hasn’t learned his lesson. Lately he has been holding Congressional Hearings searching for a scandal he can use to impeach President Obama. Will someone please explain the 25th Amendment to him before we end up with Joe Biden or John Boehner.
I am the wrong gender to argue forcibly about womens’ health issues. Too often it is male dominated legislatures or boards of directors who try to tell women what to do with their bodies. On the Hoag abortion debate, I gladly defer to Newport Beach Independent columnist Jean Ardell who seems a voice of reason. My wife is more strident on the issue and suggested I pass along the message she saw on a sign at a recent rally. It read: “If my uterus could shoot bullets, maybe you’d stop trying to regulate it.”
Speaking of regulation, a great paranoia for many gun owners is the fear that a law requiring background checks is the first step towards establishing a national gun registry. So explain why the same folks apparently have no problem with the NSA creating a national haystack (databank) of all our phone calls?
They aren’t the only ones hoping to ignore NSA spying. NSA leaker Edwin Snowden has been stuck at the Moscow airport trying to flee to Latin America, but President Obama was dismissive, saying “I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker.” Russian President Putin also tried to divert attention from the impasse, likening it to “shearing a pig – lots of screams but little wool.”
Verizon Communications also wants the NSA spying issue to go away. They’ve just introduced a “Share Everything Plan” for their wireless users and don’t want customers worrying about who they’ll be sharing with.
A while back I wrote that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West were looking for names starting with “K” for their new baby. Since that ruled out “Bob,” I suggested they might try “Knob” instead. I can now report they settled on “Knorth.” Unfortunately the hospital misspelled it and the poor kid is going to go through life without a K to his name. I wouldn’t have passed this along, but summers are slow in the newsroom and keeping up kan be komplicated. So you probably missed the news that Kim and Kanye just spent $130,000 on a bed for their new house. Talk about konspicuous konsumption.
