Angry drive-thru customer opens fire, wounding manager
A Brooklyn Park man was arrested today after he argued with a Wendy’s drive-through clerk about prices after midnight and returned minutes later to fire shots into the pickup window, slightly wounding a manager, police said.

I saw the above headline while browsing the StarTribune’s site today, and with a hook like that I just had to read the story to find out more about “Drive-through Rage.” All in all it wasn’t a shocking tale; kind of run-of-the mill. Maybe it was one of those deals where the guy in the car and the manager behind the drive-through window argued, things got out of hand, the manager suggested the customer was a psycho nut-job, the driver was offended and just to show the manager how wrong she was, he went and got a gun and acted like a psycho nut-job. There’s a lot of that going around these days, you know.

Anyway, I was going to move on when I saw two interesting headlines juxtapositioned beside the drive-through article, one above the other. The first headline read, “New York had lowest crime rate of nation’s 10 largest cities in 2005, FBI says”. The one below it said, “Violent crime up in Minneapolis.” Well, that was intriguing, so I clicked on the New York story first.

NEW YORK — New York remained the safest of the nation’s 10 largest cities in 2005, with about one crime reported for every 37 people, according to FBI statistics…

…The national figures showed that violent crime rose 2.3 percent last year, the first increase since 2001. But in New York City, violent crimes — which include murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — fell 1.9 percent.

Well, crime is decreasing in New York, but up slightly around the country. That must explain the increase in crime in Minneapolis alluded to in the other headline, right? I clicked on the Minneapolis story.

Minneapolis’ violent crime rate continues to outpace that of 2005, but authorities said Monday that a recent crackdown on juvenile crime is slowing the increase.

The violent crime rate from January to Sept. 11, 2006, was 25.8 percent higher than the same period last year, according to Minneapolis police. That includes murder, robbery, aggravated assaults and rape. The increase from 2005 was as high as 60 percent in January and stayed above 30 percent for most of the year.

Wow, a 25.8 percent increase — and that was comparing 2006 thus far to 2005 statistics — and the police say it could be 60 percent if they weren’t doing such a good job! Does this suggest Minneapolis is more dangerous than New York? Quiet, midwestern, progressive Minneapolis, compared to gritty, hustling New York, the city that never sleeps because you’ll get your shoes stolen if you do? Certainly there’s got to be some difference in scale, right? Even if the Minneapolis crime rate jumps up it’s still got to be smaller, per capita, than New York, right?

I went back to the New York story to see where those statistics came from. Turns out the source was the FBI, which releases an annual crime survey listing crime rates state-by-state and community-by-community. There wasn’t a link in the story, so I found my own way over to the fbi.gov site. It wasn’t hard to find the report and the statistics from New York and I even did the math myself to be sure I was looking at the same report that generated the one crime for every 37 people statistic. Yep, the New York numbers came out right. There were 8,115,690 people living there in 2005, and a total of 53,623 violent crimes reported and 162,509 property crimes. Add the crimes together, divide them into the population, and that’s what you get.

So what do the Minneapolis numbers say? Hmmmm, 5,472 violent crimes, 22,417 property crimes. That doesn’t seem too bad compared to the Big Rotten Apple. Let’s see, population 376,277 divided by 27,899 equals….one crime reported for every 13.5 people! That’s nearly the same as Dallas (one crime for every 12 people), the 10th largest city in the nation! (For what it’s worth, the numbers for St. Paul come out as 278,692 population, 2,442 violent crimes and 13,693 property crimes reported, or one crime for every 17.2 people).

Again, the FBI numbers are from 2005, and the numbers from the Strib article about violent crime in Minneapolis describe an increase in 2006 over 2005.

Hmmm, I wonder if there’s a connection between crimes in drive-throughs and Hennepin County’s “drive-through” justice system?

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I’m still on blogging vacation, but a recent event got me to pondering comparitive cultural approaches to crime and punishment. I will meditate on this during my time off. In the meantime:

Four young men broke into an apartment in South Minneapolis last week, only to be wounded and chased away by an intended victim wielding a samurai sword. Three of the attempted robbers have been arrested: Hossem Chalbi, Iman Ahmed Abdelhakim and Mohammed Khalil. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I’m guessing that these youths aren’t Amish.

Chalbi was slashed on the arm and Khalil was slashed on the abdomen and also lost a finger. Assuming Khalil isn’t a wayward Amish who has forsaken his religion of peace, but is perhaps a follower of the Islamic law of Sharia, then he got off relatively easy: the Sharia penalty for theft calls for amputation of the whole hand.

(Interesting but unrelated sidenote: the attempted robbery took place in the 3100 block of Lyndale Avenue S. I used to live just two blocks away, in the 3100 block of Harriet Avenue S. I didn’t have a samurai sword, but I did keep an old bayonet around the house.)

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Ok, so it’s day one of my blogging vacation and here I’ve already broken my self-imposed exile. Just because I intended to stop writing, however, doesn’t mean I’ve stopped reading and this post from The Wide Awake Cafe brought me out of my hammock. It contains a link to a series of photos and video images from EU Referendum that show the revealing timeline and backstory behind the famous images from the Qana attack (caution, the photos of the childrens’ bodies are intense).

It is clear that, as we have known, the Israeli attacks killed many civilians. What is illuminated, however, is what we have long suspected: these events, if not deliberately instigated, are enthusiastically manipulated by the likes of the dynamic duo of Green Helmet and White Tee-Shirt Guy with assistance from their gang, The Willing Media in their never-ending quest to score political points.

Sadly, outrageously, the score is being kept by dead bodies. These little girls are dead, perhaps coldly killed by Israeli bombs, but assuredly and cold-bloodedly exploited by the psycho cockroaches of Hizbollah and its patrons who first used these children as human shields and then searched the rubble for the most shocking remains to be paraded bathetically in front of the cameras and then abandoned as indifferently as when they were thrust into the line of fire in the first place.

This story, combined with the news that broke over the weekend of the doctored photos published by Reuters (a story that even CNN couldn’t ignore) is truly depressing. Rather than return to my hammock, I think I may go to my prayer closet instead.

That’s all I’m blogging today. However, for more details on the Reuters scandal see these related stories from Powerline, Michelle Malkin and the blogger credited with exposing the fake photos, Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs (slow loading due to very heavy traffic).

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Mitch reminds us that yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the death of war correspondent Steven Vincent, killed not in the heat of battle but in cold blood by Islamic “warriors” who targeted him because of things he had written (I believe we’re still waiting for the New York Times to be outraged).

Interestingly enough, today happens to be the birthday of one of America’s first embedded reporters, Ernie Pyle. I read a lot of Pyle’s writing, and writing about him by others, when I was in junior high and high school. It was a time when war was a fascinating subject for me and I read voraciously about the Civil War and World War II, cutting my teeth on Richard Tregaskis and the Landmark Series put out by Random House and moving on to Pyle and many others.

Pyle was a native of Indiana, where I lived at the time, which may have made him more interesting to me at first. What stands out now for me, however, is that his coverage of World War II may have been the first reading I had done that pierced the romantic cloud of glory and honor and all the glittery trappings that can so easily mask the reality of war when viewed from the distance imposed by geography, or experience — or willful ignorance. While there was certainly plenty of glory and honor in Pyle’s stories, it was tight-lipped and gritty as he related the activities of men who didn’t fight for a cuase so much as they fought for each other and for the chance to see another day, and sometimes paused to consider what they may have lost in the process. A great collection of Pyle’s columns can be found online here.

From Pyle I began to get a picture of men who hated what they were doing but knew it had to be done, which I later learned also pretty much described his own feelings about his calling. Though he won a Pulitzer for his reporting and was able to leave the war for awhile, Pyle chose to re-enter the storm and was subsequently killed by a sniper while covering the action in the Pacific.

Steven Vincent was a worthy successor to Pyle and there are many others today such as Michael Yon who carry on the tradition of giving the reader a chance to see the picture up close. That is an invaluable perspective because it blows away the camouflage that others (pro and con, left and right) so easily create for those who prefer to watch from a distance.

In the process some of these correspondents die too young. At the same time, something very important lives on. I urge you to check out the above link to the Pyle collection and rediscover (or discover) the power of a compelling story, expertly told.

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There’s an interesting story that’s been going through the emails for a couple of months, but I haven’t read any accounts of it in the blogs. I got around to checking it out and I found out that not only is the story true (and pretty neat), there’s another eerie detail as well.

The main part of the story is that construction is about half-completed on the USS New York, a new amphibious assault ship for the Navy that will be launched next year. There are a couple of details that make this noteworthy: the ship is one of three such craft made to support special operations missions against terrorists, and all three ships bear a name associated with 9/11. The other two ships are the USS Arlington (for the Pentagon) and the USS Somerset (for the county were Flight 93 crashed). The coolest detail is that the New York’s bow is made from 24 tons of scrap steel salvaged from the Twin Towers and reforged. You can read the touching story here.

Artist rendering of USS New York (Northrop Grumman)

While the Navy used to name battleships after states of the union this practice is currently reserved for nuclear submarines, so resurrecting the name for an amphibious assault ship required an exception. In fact, there have been at least seven ships named the USS New York, and the last one was a sub (I know, a sub is really a boat, not a ship).

Here’s the eerie twist: after googling the name of the ship I discovered that prior to the submarine the last USS New York (BB-34) had been a battleship that had seen action in both World Wars. The keel of that battleship was laid on a very interesting date:

September 11, 1911.

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A housecat has been sentenced to house arrest following a reign of terror that included attacking the local Avon lady (must have been the Skin-So-Soft). The judge’s options included euthanasia (for the cat, not the Avon lady), exile or being kept indoors, with repercussions for both the cat and its owner if the terms are violated.

“There are no exceptions. None,” said Judge Patrick Carroll, who also granted accelerated rehabilitation to Lewis’ owner, Ruth Cisero. That means her record will be expunged if she successfully completes two years of probation.

Cisero had faced a charge of reckless endangerment because neighbors complained that the cat’s long claws and stealth have allowed it to attack at least a half-dozen people and ambush the Avon lady as she was getting out of her car.

Cisero had fought to keep Lewis alive and in Connecticut. She rejected a previous offer of accelerated rehabilitation if she agreed to euthanize Lewis.

Carroll said Lewis cannot leave the house, even if he gets out accidentally. He said the case is not about a cat, but about people having the right to live in safety in their neighborhoods.

The case drew national attention. Lewis has appeared in People magazine and his own page on the social networking site MySpace.com.

It all sounds a bit like our own cat, which has been known to show an antisocial side. Once he even sunk four teeth into the young Mall Diva’s cheek and then got to explore his aerodynamic capabilities as I “cat”-a-pulted him out of the kitchen door. Fortunately for him, the door was open at the time, though I don’t think that was something I consciously took into account.

Another time when the girls were young he thought it would be amusing to lurk under a chair by the hallway to the bedrooms and then run out and slash at ankles. First the youngest toddled down the hall to bed: pounce/slash/tears. A bit later the eldest daughter went the same direction. Same result. Later still my wife made her way down the hall: pounce/slash/”you stupid cat!”

I couldn’t believe his tenacity and attention span. When it came time for me to retire I started down the corridor of death, with my ears open. When I heard the telltale rush of little feet I turned quickly, crouched, spread my arms and shouted, “WHAT?!”

I swear, it was like a cartoon as the cat slammed on the front brakes while the rest of his body accordioned into his displaceable collarbones. Then he tried to act all innocent while taking a keen interest in a piece of fuzz on the rug. Yeah, right. I knew he had blood on his claws.

Anyway, I wish the woman with the sociopathic cat a lot of luck in keeping him indoors. We keep our cat (cats, when we had two of them) indoors and he/they were always trying to convince strangers that came to the house that they were, indeed, outdoor cats, and if the visitor would just kindly step out of the way, they had a pressing engagement. They once successfully conned the Schwann’s man in this way, but the joke was on them.

That afternoon the temperature was about -20 F windchill. Not only that, but we didn’t realize that they were outside. It was not until about two hours later when we realized we hadn’t seen the guys for awhile, and when I thought I heard something a bit higher-pitched than the winter wind outside the front door. I opened up and there were two cat-sicles most definitely interested in coming in, though they moved a bit like the Tin Woodsman without his 40-weight. After they’d had a couple of minutes to warm up, one of the cats hauled off and took a whack at the other one, as if to say, “I told you that was a stupid idea!”

One of the cats has since gone to the Big Sleep (but not for capital punishment purposes) but the remaining one still tries to make his escape whenever possible, though I think it’s more like a game. The last time he got out I happened to look outside and saw him standing at the end of the sidewalk to our driveway. I matter-of-factly opened the front door and said, “Get your butt in here.” To my utter amazement, that’s exactly what he did, trotting in right past my feet like an obedient beagle.

It’s not clear from the story whether or not the cat in the headline will be euthanized if he gets out, but one option is moving him to an animal home out in Nevada where the nearest neighbor is four miles away. That neighbor, however, is a guy after my own heart.

… Victor Sandonato said he has already been warned that Lewis might be moving to his neighborhood.

“I live with a cat just like Lewis, and I live with danger every time I go home at night,” he said, adding, “I’m from South Jersey, so I don’t take any crap from a cat.”

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When I saw this story I naturally thought of one Massachusetts senator in particular who perhaps thought the Fluffernutter reference was aimed at him (and you’d have to have really bad aim to miss him).

Actually, it turns out it is a dispute in the state legislature as one state senator has proposed a bill limiting how often the popular Fluffernutter (Fluff marshmallow creme and peanut butter) sandwiches can be featured in public school lunches. Strong feelings abound, as another senator has countered with a proposal to make the Fluffernutter the official sandwich of the commonwealth.

Fluffernutter. Made of marshmallow creme and peanut butter. Maybe they are talking about Teddy after all. Senator Fluffernutter: I like the sound of that.

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We may not be able to defend our borders, but one California courthouse is on guard for Dr. Evil’s Fembots:

Bra sets off metal detector in Calif.
Associated Press
YUBA CITY, Calif. – A taxpayer advocate has complained to Sutter County supervisors that metal detectors at county buildings are so sensitive they are being set off by underwire bras.

Sutter County Taxpayers Association member Roberta Fletcher said the male security guard seemed to enjoy waving the handheld metal detector over her chest.

“It is, at a minimum, for a woman, embarrassing. And at a maximum, it is sexual harassment to hold your arms outstretched while a male officer waves a wand in front of your breasts,” Fletcher told supervisors at their meeting Tuesday.

Sheriff Jim Denney said courthouse guards work for the court system, not the sheriff’s department, but defended use of the metal detectors.

“That’s the nature of the business – to maintain security,” Denney told Fletcher. “I’m not going to answer any more absurd questions.”

Fletcher also had little sympathy from board Chairman Larry Munger and other supervisors.

“I don’t think it’s harassment; it’s protection,” Munger said.

“Men just don’t get it,” Fletcher told the supervisors.

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So much music news lately. For one, everyone’s talking about the new version of our national anthem translated into Spanish with a lot of new lyrics. I guess it was inevitable as illegal workers and non-workers flood in from countries too poor to offer their own jobs, security and national anthem would come here seeking all those things.

Actually, Mexico has a fine national anthem, borrowed from New Jersey: “Born to Run”.

Changing our anthem around to suit their purposes is just downright disrespectful, and these folks wouldn’t like it if others did the same to them. What will the response be when Iran decides to adopt “Living la Vida Loca” as its anthem?

Also, the media seems awed by the artistic daring and originality of Neil Young’s “Impeach the President” song (those that aren’t obsessed with the fate of The Pickler, that is). I guess somebody has to pay attention to these things and the MSM is just irrelevant enough to do the job on both counts while waiting for someone to leak real news to them. In the meantime, Leo has taken the cue from the national anthem changers and come up with new lyrics to Young’s “Old Man” song:

Neil Young, look at your life, you’re a moonbat has-been!
Neil Young, look at your life, you’re a moonbat has-been!

Neil Young look at your life,
64 and and there’s just no more
Livin’ in a drunken stupor
Mind all full o’ goo…
Livin on half a brain
blew your mind out on cocaine
All your lyrics are inane
And your voice is too…

Looking at Neil’s photo, however, I think there’s an opportunity to rework another of his standards. How about “Forehead in Ohio”?

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Last week I featured “To Kill a Mockingbird” in the weekly Fundamentals in Film series on this blog. The main drama in that movie centers around a black man, Tom Robinson, on trial for raping a white woman. The man is defended by the main character of the movie, Atticus Finch. As I watched the movie again it got me to thinking about some the interesting parallels and juxtapositions between the movie trial and the seamy details surrounding the current rape case against the Duke lacrosse players.

My interpretation of these parallels does not mean I think the Duke players are innocent of rape as Robinson was innocent. The statements and disparagement of the evidence (and lack of evidence) proclaimed by the defense teams are interesting, but I keep in mind that these are the defense lawyers after all, doing their job while the prosecution has to play it closer to the vest. It is worth noting that while there has been a lot of attention focused on the alleged victim’s questionable past, it turns out that one of the defendents himself may not be a model of decorum either. This doesn’t mean that he or his friend are guilty, either. That judgment must still be played out, and will be in the eyes, ears and hands of the judge and jury that draw the case.

What I found interesting, however, is that implicit in the movie was the prejudicial “you know how they are” assumption by most of the whites regarding Tom and his fellow black men. Part and parcel of that was the belief that one didn’t dare doubt the word of a white woman, especially over that of a black man. Today the situation is reversed: I sense a distinctly implied “you know how they are” assumption about the privileged, white lacrosse players from an elite school. Meanwhile, politically correct doctrine says that of course you never doubt the word of a woman over a man. These are really just different drawers in the same chifferobe, where ugly things have been stuffed for generations. I would have hoped that if we had learned anything by now it is that no sex and no race has a monopoly on honor and innocence, nor is any free from having its own self-serving agendas and rationalizations.

In both the movie and in real life the defense tries to show the absurdity of the prosecution’s case. Atticus Finch, for example, demonstrated that the victim could only have been beaten by a left-handed man, while the defendent was unable to use his left hand as a result of a childhood farming accident. Today, the miracles of DNA testing, cell-phone photos and time-stamped ATM transactions go up against eye-witness accounts and whatever evidence District Attorney Mike Nifong has that has given him the confidence to pursue the case.

In both the movie and in the current events it is clear that something went on. The movie didn’t reveal just what that something was. It will be interesting to see if the same will be said of the upcoming trial. One thing that does seem the same in both cases, however, is that the person representing the interests of the black person (Finch for the defense in the movie, Nifong now) shoulders the most hostility. For everyone’s sake, what this circus needs is the quiet decency of a real-life Atticus on both sides but I fear that possibility left town the minute the first tv camera hit town, leaving the media to grow as fat and thick as ticks on a Carolina hound.

Of course, “To Kill a Mockingbird” was a story, while today’s story is all too real. The real difference for me, however, is that the movie reflected the fear of change. Today’s events reflect the fear that perhaps we haven’t really changed at all.

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