Month: September 2003

I don’t think the endorsement by Tom Metzger (quasi-famous former Grand Wizard of the California Ku Klux Klan and director of the White Aryan Resistance) will particularly hurt Cruz Bustamante in his run for the California recall governorship — but it probably won’t help, either, and it will draw further attention to Bustamante’s unrenounced (if softpedaled) relationship to MEChA, a Chicano activist/separatist group.

Dean Esmay offers a hypothetical situation:

Let’s pretend that the election of 2004 is the worst-imaginable in the entire history of the Democratic Party. Not only does Bush win re-election, but Republicans win every race–every single race–nationwide in America. Every House race, every Senate race, every governorship, all of them.
I don’t just mean the “competitive” races. I mean, the completely impossible happens, and Republicans win every race, everywhere they’ve fielded a candidate.
I grant you, I am positing the impossible. This is a thought-experiment. But tell me: what happens as a result?

I think his answer is a correct one, based on what’s happened the last two or three decades when one party or the other has actually seized control of the White House and Congress at the same time.

And, yes, you can play the same game with the Democrats, and get largely the same answer.

So reservoirs are full, and Denver Water is relaxing water restrictions on 10/1, and I even discovered that I’d turned the sprinkler system off last weekend and forgotten to turn it back on in time for the Wednesday watering.

So I had it back on last night, and, like every Saturday night, it went on before midnight, late at night. See, I want to run it at night, but I don’t want to run it too early, in case someone wants to take a pre-going-to-bed shower.

Which is why, I guess, since our sprinklers run for more than an hour, we got a watering violation notice this morning, wherein a photo was taken at 2:38a of us watering our lawn on (gasp!) Sunday morning, not our allowed Saturday night.

Yes, the Water Police were out at 3 in the morning, noting that our sprinklers were on during a forbidden day (hrm, always thought of it as Saturday night, but I guess, technically it’s Sunday morning).

I can’t believe, though, that even with the fine, it’s worth their having people driving around looking for this sort of thing. Silly me.

And, I guess, I’ll set the sprinklers to start earlier.

A judge has thrown out another law suit against McDonalds, which had claimed that McDs used “misleading advertising to lure children into eating unhealthy foods that make them fat.”

Huzzah.

This was the second time around for the suit; the judge had earlier dismissed it but had left it open for refiling if certain info was included to back up the allegation. The refiling did not include that info.

“The plaintiffs have made no explicit allegations that they witnessed any particular deceptive advertisement and they have not provided McDonald’s with enough information to determine whether its products are the cause of the alleged injuries,” Sweet said.
“Finally, the one advertisement which plaintiffs implicitly allege to have caused their injuries is objectively non-deceptive,” he said.
Sweet had said in January the plaintiffs could amend the suit with information backing their claim that diners have no idea what is really in their food or that the products have allegedly become more harmful because of processing.

Okay, folks, repeat this after me. And I’ll put it in bold, so that kids searching via Google will be able to find it and learn from it.

McDonalds food has a lot of fat in it. Eating too much of it is probably not good for you, and will contribute to your being overweight.

There, now that we have that settled, can we use the courts for something useful?