Be Careful What You Ask For

Here's a classic via Overlawyered:

"IBM responds to overtime lawsuits with 15% salary cuts"

The fastest-growing area of employment litigation in recent years has been wage-and-hour class actions, perhaps the biggest subset of which are lawsuits charging that white-collar employees have been misclassified as exempt from hourly wage and overtime calculations. Like many big employers, IBM has been hit with such suits from lawyers seeking to represent thousands of its employees. Information Week:

The good news for those workers is that IBM now plans to grant them so-called "non-exempt" status so they can collect overtime pay. The bad news: IBM will cut their base salaries by 15% to make up the difference, InformationWeek has learned.

The plan has been greeted with howls of protest from affected workers.

The payroll restructuring goes into effect Feb. 16 and applies to about 8,000 IBM employees classified as technical services and IT specialists, according to internal IBM documents reviewed by InformationWeek and sources at the computer maker.

The plan calls for a "15% base salary adjustment down across all units with eligibility for overtime," the documents state. The move is a direct response to the employee lawsuits -- at least one of which has apparently been settled.

"To avoid protracted litigation in an area of law widely seen as ambiguous, IBM chose to settle the case -- and to conduct a detailed review of the jobs in question," the documents state.

The giant tech company also intends to lobby for modernization of New Deal era wage-and-hour laws which might allow it to restore the previous compensation methods. Good luck with that -- even if it can show that most of the workers involved would themselves favor salaried rather than hourly status, the political clout of unions and trial lawyers has stymied efforts at legislative reform in the past. (Paul McDougall, Information Week/EETimes.com, Jan. 23).

Be a "Can't Do" Catholic

I know a woman who is beautiful, talented, and is willing to undertake just about any challenge. She rarely admits that something can't be done*. She is a "can do" woman. This however, is not about her, but about how, with Lent coming early this year, we should use the opportunity to be "can't do" Catholics -- we can't do it without our Savior.

Here's how.

Lent and Reality

by Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P.

Here's what to give up this Lent: the doubt that goes, "I can never get closer to God because I'm too sinful, too flawed, too weak." This is a lethal attitude, for it is based on the false presumption that we can possess something of our own — that does not come from God — by which we can please God. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Only what is from God can please God. But as long as such error persists, we estrange ourselves from God. Lent is not about lamenting our inadequacy. Rather, it is a graced moment to receive from God what he is eager to give us so that we can live the friendship with him that he desires.

How do we approach reality?

As one contemporary theologian has explained it, God does not judge us on the level of our ethical blamelessness, but on the way we approach reality . . . starting with the reality of our deficiencies and imperfection. There's a reason why Lent begins with the command,

"Remember that you are dust!" Self-confident self-knowledge of our nothingness and misery stands as the indispensable starting point for salvation simply because that is the reality which we are forced to face every day. For salvation by definition is an escape from our own inability.

The trouble is that, on account of our fallen state, we try to compensate for the lack we find in ourselves by attempting to be self-sufficient. Seized by a strange contradiction, we strive to please God by proving that we can get along without him. When delusion such as this infests our life, God acts. In his mercy, God permits our soul to be covered with a kind of darkness in which we feel separated from him — we may even wonder if God hates us.

There's a reason for the darkness. God knows how tempted we are to withdraw from him whenever we experience the defects in ourselves that displease him. The truth is, however, that instead of withdrawing, the most reasonable thing we can do when that feeling strikes is to renew our act of love and confidence in God's love for us. The Lord allows the darkness precisely to move us to unite ourselves all the more closely to him who alone is the Truth. For the only logical thing to do when enshrouded in darkness is to reach for the Light.

Doing the impossible

Still — we panic! We feel as if we are obliged to do for God what we know we are unable to do. But the point of this pressure is to convince us to receive everything from God. We can be sure that God himself is the one who, in his mercy, moves us to do what is not within our own power. This is the Father's way of opening us a little more to himself by making us a little more in the likeness of his crucified Son.

For nothing glorifies God like the confidence in his mercy that we display when we feel indicted by our frailty and inability. The experience of our hopelessness is a heaven-sent chance to exercise supremely confident trust. God delights in giving us the grace to trust him.

Sadly, for those who refuse God's gift of confidence, the darkness can turn to despair. Yet even in despair the miracle of mercy is at work. Father Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, the 19th century Dominican priest who was responsible for the revival of the Order of Preachers in France after the French Revolution, makes this astonishing remark: "There is in despair a remnant of human greatness, because it includes a contempt for all created things, and consequently an indication of the incomparable capacity of our being." In our darkness, the incomparable capacity of our being will settle for nothing less than the embrace of the Infinite. Like nothing else, our helplessness moves us to cry out for that embrace in confidence and trust. The cry of forsakenness that Jesus emits from the cross is just this.

The grace of being forsaken

Saint Paul wrote, "We were left to feel like men condemned to death so that we might trust, not in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead" (2 Cor 1:9). That's the point. That's the challenge of Lent. God wants us to have the strength to believe in his love so much that we confidently beg for his mercy no matter how much we may feel the horror of death in ourselves.

We become like little children fit for heaven when we no longer look for peace and security in our own strength, in our own goodness. This grace lies at the root of the famous serene assurance of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: "Ah! Lord, I know you don't command the impossible. You know better than I do my weakness and imperfection . . . Now I am astonished at nothing. I am not disturbed at seeing myself weakness itself. On the contrary, it is in my weakness that I glory, and I expect each day to discover new imperfections in myself." God is not interested in our prowess or prestige; he came to call sinners; he loves the lost sheep; he promises the good thief paradise.

Let us this Lent, in the face of all our sins, our limitations, and our weakness cry out with Jesus, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" And let us do so with certainty — not doubt or desperation — because our union with Christ crucified has given us The Way to approach reality. In our asking we hold the Answer.

---

Father Peter John Cameron, O.P., is the Editor-in-Chief of Magnificat and the author of "The Classics of Catholic Spirituality" and "To Praise, To Bless, To Preach: Spiritual Reflections of the Sunday Gospels".

© Magnificat USA, LLC

* Oh, here's the "can do" woman working on one of her projects.

Skewering Liberal Hypocrisy

The New York Times recently added conservative writer Bill Kristol to its op-ed page, likely to try to at least produce some semblance of balance to their hard left liberal stance on everything. Apparently, their readers aren't interested in appearances and have been expressing their displeasure. The Times' "public editor" chimed in with an article criticizing the paper's move as well. Here is a comment posted on Powerline that masterfully skewers their hypocrisy:

Concerning your article about William Kristol, and the howling mob who would string him up from a lamppost, while doubtless murmuring pieties about freedom of speech -- they're just ideas, folks, relax. We know you're not used to hearing ideas that don't comport with yours -- after all you went to college where rarely is heard a conservative word -- but take a deep breath. And, after all, part of the definition of liberal is to be "open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others" (American Heritage Dictionary). Just as freedom of speech isn't enshrined in our Bill of Rights to protect only popular speech -- surely it is unpopular speech that needs protecting -- the liberal mind shouldn't be open only to those ideas it is in agreement with.

Oh, and by the way, if Scooter Libby can be prosecuted for outing an arguably covert agent, which, as I recall, the Times was so zealous in pursuing, why shouldn't the Times be liable for prosecution for revealing a classified program? You feel you can conduct yourself any way you please, and then claim "intimidation" if called to account? Go carefully, and remember the story about the boy and the wolf.

What the ?

What an odd story. While I don't condone toe licking without a license, I think I would have been a little suspicious when the assistant covered my eyes for the "strip test". Hmm.

Suit alleges patient's toes were licked during eye exam in Skokie

By Jason Meisner

Tribune reporter

12:31 AM CST, January 17, 2008

A woman filed suit Wednesday against a Skokie eye doctor and the doctor's former assistant, alleging the assistant licked her toes during an eye-exam visit last year.

The lawsuit, filed in Cook County Circuit Court by Roman Tesfaye, names the assistant, Joseph Vernell Jr., and the doctor, Tamara Wyse, and seeks in excess of $50,000 in damages for battery and emotional distress.

According to the suit, the incident occurred July 13 when Tesfaye went to the Myers-Wyse Center for the Eye, 4700 Golf Rd. in Skokie, for an exam. After she was escorted into an examination room, Vernell, dressed in surgical scrubs, entered and dimmed the lights.

The suit alleges Vernell then told her he was going to perform a "strip test," and placed a strip over her eyes and told her she must keep her eyes closed for 5 to 7 minutes. He then reclined the examination chair and raised her legs onto another chair, at which point Tesfaye "felt her right shoe fall off," the suit states.

"Ms. Tesfaye felt something touching her toes," according to the suit. "After feeling the toe-touching several times, she opened her eyes and witnessed Mr. Vernell stand up and pull his shirt down."

When she accused him of licking her toes, Vernell allegedly replied, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but I was checking your sugar level," the suit states.

Tesfaye reported the incident to an administrator, but Wyse refused to discuss what had happened, the suit says. Vernell was eventually fired, the suit says.

Court records show Vernell, of Forest Park, pleaded guilty in August to misdemeanor battery in the incident and was sentenced to 1 year of probation by Circuit Judge Earl Hoffenberg.

No one answered calls to Vernell's home Wednesday night and attempts to reach Wyse were unsuccessful.

"Watching your husband is not experience."

Great editorial from IBD yesterday.
An Empty Pantsuit

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, January 16, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: If Hillary Clinton is proud of her experience and record of change, why are 2 million pages of her White House files locked up? Watching your husband is not experience.

The last time Sen. Clinton was a genuine agent of change was when she led the secretive Health Care Task Force in 1993-94 that labored mightily to propose a Godzilla-size bureaucracy that would have nationalized one-seventh of the nation's economy. To receive medical care you would have gone to the equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

That proposal was one of the key factors in the GOP tsunami of 1994. She helped Republicans gain control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. The universal health care she proposes now is virtually unchanged from her original dream of turning the U.S. into Canada.

After the health care debacle, Hillary slipped, or was pushed, below the radar. We don't know much about her "experience" as "co-president," largely because reams of calendars, memos and other records remain under seal until after this year's election.

We do know she has spent much of the past 35 years watching her husband. She watched him be attorney general of Arkansas, then governor, then president of the United States. She was in charge of putting down "bimbo eruptions" during her husband's 1992 presidential campaign. But again, that counts as watching her husband.

She would lead the war on terror, but her experience in that area lies in watching Bill fail to pull the trigger when he repeatedly had Osama bin Laden in his sights. On their watch, the U.S. did virtually nothing — except shamelessly withdraw from Somalia — while terrorists killed Americans on three continents.

Hillary did urge her husband to appoint Janet Reno as the first female attorney general, a move he'd later describe as "my worst mistake." While the Clinton Justice Department treated the first attack on the World Trade Center as a law enforcement matter, Reno kept busy incinerating religious zealots in Waco.

Hillary has been in the Senate for seven years, during which time she has accomplished nothing of note except for voting for the Iraq War before she was against it. No major piece of legislation bears her name.

Her public record and career is even spottier and shorter than that of her opponent, Sen. Barack Obama. He's been in public service for 11 years, including eight in the Illinois Senate before becoming the state's junior U.S. senator. She's made a lot of speeches, but has governed nowhere at any level and has led no major organizations.

Her possible GOP opponents have experienced and accomplished much more than the author of "It Takes a Village."

Mitt Romney has run an Olympic Games, been a successful businessman and served as governor of the blue state of Massachusetts. Sen. John McCain once led the largest squadron in the U.S. Navy and has actually gotten legislation passed in a long and distinguished Senate career. He speaks with moral authority on both terror and torture. Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City during a time of crisis in our nation's history.

But, hey, Hillary did manage to turn $1,000 into a $100,000 windfall in the cattle futures market, didn't she? What other candidate has done that?

Nanny State Update

I got a "nice" letter from the State of Illinois the other day and I'm still fuming about it.

You see, I have (another) new teenage driver in my family. Apparently, in the interests of keeping the streets safe, the State has a special program that allows parents access to their teenager's driving record. I'm sure our state officials thought this was a progressive idea when they rolled it out. However, being the curmudgeon that I am, I disagree.

This program is based on the assumption that parents and teens are so disconnected that either the parents have no clue as to what their kids are up to and/or that the teens will reflexively lie to them if they have an accident or get a ticket. So, in order to ensure that the parents are in the 'know', the state insists that the teens waive their right to privacy when they get their license so that their parents can go on-line and snoop on their kid's driving record.

Sorry, I guess I'm old fashioned, but I have a lot more faith and trust in my children.

What's even more galling about this is that the State thinks it's so important for parents to be able to check on what their teens are doing behind the wheel. But, when it comes to sex, the state if firmly in the privacy corner. A pregnant teen could seek and get an abortion and, as far as the State's concerned, the parents have no right to know about that. In fact, the State will help facilitate that teen getting an abortion behind the parent's back.

Just another example of how screwed up our society and culture is.

Blood-stained brow,
He wasn't broken for nothing.
Arms nailed down,
He didn't die for nothing.

A Fringe-Left Pin-Up
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, October 05, 2007 4:20 PM PT

Election: There's something a little off about a presidential candidate who disdains wearing the flag of the nation he seeks to lead. But maybe it's because the voters he's seeking see a defeated America as a good thing.

Barack Obama made a big deal last week of not wearing an American flag in his lapel as other presidential candidates do, saying he didn't need it to prove his patriotism. "I probably haven't worn a flag pin in a very long time," he told a TV interviewer in Iowa.

Now, there's nothing wrong with not wearing a flag pin, and if it were just a personal preference, it would be a nonissue. But Obama had to politicize this, first by sneering at those who wear flags as hypocrites and then using it to woo the fringe left, a key Democratic voting bloc in the primary season.

"My attitude is that I'm less concerned about what you're wearing on your lapel than what's in your heart," he lectured. "You show your patriotism by how you treat your fellow Americans, especially those who serve. You show your patriotism by being true to our values and ideals."

His sanctimony turned to meanness when he denounced flag-pin wearers. "After a while, you start noticing people wearing a lapel pin, but not acting very patriotic," he said.

His definition of patriotism is peculiar: "Shortly after 9/11 . . . that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security. I decided I won't wear that pin on my chest; instead I'm gonna try to tell the American people what I believe . . . will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism."

So there you have it — "speaking out" is patriotic, and patriotic acts are hypocritical. If Republicans wear flag pins, he won't. But don't dare question his patriotism.

This defensive radicalism cloaked in patriotic words coincides with a Fox News Opinion Dynamics poll showing that one of five of Democrats think the world "would be better off if the U.S. lost the war" in Iraq.

This 19% is the angry MoveOn.org crowd, the prime group Democrats seek to win over. It's undecided but ideological; when it's not burning a flag, it will do anything to undermine U.S. strength. It sees itself as nobler than America, and therefore doesn't favor the U.S. over others.

This defeatist bloc is Obama's big prize. Little wonder Obama won't wear the stars and stripes. With MoveOn.org in the saddle, there's no pinning a flag on the party of the donkey.

Don't Vote for Osama Obama

This story is a couple of months old, but still important -- especially in light of the fact that Obama also refuses to salute the flag. (I guess saluting the flag must also be "a substitute for 'true patriotism' ".)

Obama Stops Wearing Flag Pin
Oct 4 03:06 PM US/Eastern

WATERLOO, Iowa (AP) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said he doesn't wear the American flag lapel pin because it has become a substitute for "true patriotism" since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Asked about the decision Wednesday in an interview with KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Illinois senator said he stopped doing so shortly after the attacks and instead hoped to show his patriotism by explaining his ideas to citizens.

"The truth is that right after 9-11 I had a pin," Obama said. "Shortly after 9-11, particularly because as we're talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security.

"I decided I won't wear that pin on my chest," he said in the interview. "Instead, I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testament to my patriotism."

Obama was campaigning in Iowa Thursday, the second day of a four-day trip to the early voting state.

UPDATE: What a Crock

While it's beneath the U.S. media to acknowledge our military, I note, via Powerline, that others are not so blind. General Petraues is the U.K.'s Sunday Telegraph's 'Person of the Year.

General Petraeus: man with a message of hope

The critics said it couldn't be done, but the vision and determination of General David Petraeus have brought greater security and cause for optimism to the people of Iraq. He is The Sunday Telegraph's Person of the Year

For a man whose critics say he is far too fond of the television cameras, General David Petraeus, commander of US forces in Iraq, has been rather out of the limelight this Christmas.

The sprightly, media-friendly 55-year-old is not perturbed, however, that his face is no longer number one item on the US networks. As he said last week, where Iraq is concerned, "No news is good news."

Today, we put him in the spotlight again by naming Gen Petraeus as The Sunday Telegraph's Person of the Year, a new annual accolade to recognise outstanding individual achievement.

He has been the man behind the US troop surge over the past 10 months, the last-ditch effort to end Iraq's escalating civil war by putting an extra 28,000 American troops on the ground.

So far, it has achieved what many feared was impossible. Sectarian killings are down. Al-Qaeda is on the run. And the two million Iraqis who fled the country are slowly returning. Progress in Iraq is relative - 538 civilians died last month. But compared with the 3,000 peak of December last year, it offers at least a glimmer of hope. … [T]he reason for picking Petraeus is simple. Iraq, whatever the current crises in Afghanistan and Pakistan, remains the West's biggest foreign policy challenge of this decade, and if he can halt its slide into all-out anarchy, Gen Petraeus may save more than Iraqi lives.

A failed Iraq would not just be a second Vietnam, nor would it just be America's problem.

It would be a symbolic victory for al-Qaeda, a safe haven for jihadists to plot future September 11s and July 7s, and a battleground for a Shia-Sunni struggle that could draw in the entire Middle East. Our future peace and prosperity depend, in part, on fixing this mess. And, a year ago, few had much hope.

To appreciate the scale of the task Gen Petraeus took on, it is necessary to go back to February 22, 2006. Or, as Iraqis now refer to it, their own September 11. That was when Sunni-led terrorists from al-Qaeda blew up the Shia shrine in the city of Samarra, an act of provocation that finally achieved their goal of igniting sectarian civil war.

A year on, an estimated 34,000 people had been killed on either side - some of them members of the warring Sunni and Shia militias, but most innocents tortured and killed at random. US casualties continued to rise, too, but increasingly American troops became the bystanders in a religious conflict that many believed they could no longer tame.

Except, that is, for Gen Petraeus. Despite his well-documented obsession with fitness - he starts his 18-hour days with a five-mile run - he is the opposite of the brawn-over-brain image that has dogged the US military mission in Iraq.

Top of the class of 1974 at West Point Military Academy and the holder of a PhD in international relations, he is the co author of the US military's manual on counter-insurgency, a "warrior monk" for whom the messy intrigues of asymmetric warfare hold more interest than the straightforward challenges of 2003's invasion.

Simply being the best and brightest soldier of his generation, however, would not be enough for Iraq in 2007, where a major part of the "surge" involves reconciling Iraq's warring political tribes.

When the White House called, confirming him for the job, President Bush was looking not just for an outstanding leader but also a diplomat, a politician and a negotiator. It seems he got them all.

"Petraeus has a rare combination of great geopolitical skills as well as tactical and military ones," says retired General Jack Keane, a fellow architect of the surge strategy. "He is good at working with ambassadors, with the Iraqi government, and he also knows how to cope with uncertainty and failure, which is what you get in an environment like Iraq."

Lest Gen Keane seem a little biased, it should be pointed out that British commanders hold Gen Petraeus in similarly high regard.

Several Northern Ireland veterans who worked with him in Baghdad this year came away with the opinion that it is now America, not Britain, that is the world leader in counter-insurgency.

As Petraeus toured some of Baghdad's abandoned, bullet-scarred Sunni neighbourhoods last February, his own comrades were not the only ones predicting he might fail spectacularly.

Among the US public, the clamour grew for the troops to be brought home altogether, and Iraq to be declared a lost cause unworthy of further American sacrifice.

The surge's "boots on the ground" strategy would simply force the militias into temporary hiding, critics said, wasting thousands more Americans lives in the process.

The strategy's chances of success were commonly put at only one in three - and those were the odds quoted by its supporters. Indeed, when The Sunday Telegraph visited Baghdad in the spring, US troops were candid about their expectations.

"Sure, the bad guys will go into hiding," said one commander in Jamia, an al-Qaeda-infested neighbourhood with 30 murders a month. "All we can hope is that things will have improved by the time they come back, so they're no longer welcome."

Nine months on, things do seem to have improved, thanks largely to Petraeus's extraordinary coup of turning Sunni insurgents against their extremist allies in al-Qaeda.

With the chief accelerant in the civil war gone, Shia militias such as the Mehdi Army have also been deprived of their main raison d'être, and with extra US troops on the streets, Iraqis who had previously felt vulnerable to the gunmen now feel safe enough to return home.

Things are far from perfect but, after four years in which events did nothing but get worse, the sight of a souk re-opening, or a Shia family being welcomed back home by their Sunni neighbours, has remarkable morale-boosting power.

Where once Iraqis saw the glass as virtually empty, now they can see a day when it might at least be half full.

True, post-Saddam Iraq has had a habit of confounding even the most cautious of optimists.

Iraq's Shia-dominated government is not alone in worrying that the most controversial of Gen Petraeus's policies - the co-opting of former Sunni insurgents into "concerned local citizens" schemes to fend off Shia militias - may create new, better-organised forces for a renewed civil war once the US finally departs.

Many coalition officials fear such a scenario. Were it to occur, it would confirm the charges of Petraeus's critics that at best he has secured only a hiatus in the collapse of Iraq.

Ultimately, that may prove to be the case.

But it should not overshadow his achievement this year: he has given another last chance to a country that had long since ceased to expect one. And for that, Gen Petraeus is Person of the Year.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Er, I O U

Here's a good one from the WSJ's 'Best of the Web':

Katie Couric's "CBS Evening News" brings us this hard-hitting sob story:

For accountant Alex Guzzetta, not a day goes by when he doesn't think about these numbers: $90,000 in student loan debt, $20,000 owed to the federal government and $70,000 to a private lender.

"A third of every hour I work is basically just going towards just maintaining the interest on my student loans. I'm not getting anywhere, they're not getting any lower. I'm just buying time," he tells CBS News correspondent Kelly Wallace.

Guzzetta maxed out in borrowing a fixed low interest federal loan and had to take out a private loan. He says he didn't realize he'd wind up paying 10 percent in interest and a minimum of $535 a month for 30 years.

"They said 'In six months, this is what your payment's going to be,' and when I saw that I nearly had a heart attack," he said.

You can see why he went into accounting. He obviously has an aptitude for it.

Darwin Award
Meet the Candidates

One of the conditions of winning the Darwin Award is that you have to be dead. Here, however, are some candidates for the honor at a date still to be determined.

Forest Kelly Bissonnette

Bank robber listed demands on own cheque

Englewood, Colorado - A man robbing a bank demanded the money by writing a note on one of his own cheques, authorities say.

Not surprisingly, he was caught soon afterwards.

Forest Kelly Bissonnette, 27, apparently tried to cover his name on the cheque, then handed the note to a teller on September 5 at the Bank of the West in Englewood, according to authorities.

"We could still make it out even though he blacked it out," FBI agent Rene VonderHaar said. Nearly $5 000 in cash was taken.

A surveillance video showed a suspect similar to Bissonnette's description, and a tipster said a man named Forest Kelly claimed he got $5,000 in a bank robbery, according to a federal complaint.

Bissonnette remained in federal custody on Tuesday after turning himself in Friday. A public defender was to be appointed for Bissonnette. - Sapa-AP

Published on the Web by IOL on 2007-09-12 03:01:48

Randy-Jay Adolphos Jones

He holds woman's cell phone for ransom — but cops thwart plan
By JOHN M. HOOBER III, Staff
Lancaster New Era

Published: Oct 15, 2007 11:32 AM EST

LANCASTER COUNTY, PA - How much ransom money would you pay to get your cell phone back from a robber?

Perhaps $50 or $100 — maybe more if the phone were equipped with all the latest features.

But not a whopping $185,000.

Believe it or not, that was the initial amount an alleged purse snatcher told his victim he wanted in return for her cell phone, Lancaster police said.

After a few minutes of negotiating with the victim, the robber lowered his ransom figure dramatically — down to $200.

But the victim, a 29-year-old Philadelphia woman, got her phone back — and her stolen purse — without paying a single cent.

That's because Lancaster police listened to the negotiations and met the alleged robber at a rendezvous point with drawn guns.

The suspect, Randy-Jay Adolphos Jones, 29, of 2565 Ironville Pike, Columbia, was arrested on charges of robbery and indecent assault with his bail set at $100,000, police said.

Officer Jeff Gerhart, who filed the charges, gave this account:

Shortly before 1 a.m. Sunday, police got word of a purse-snatch robbery in the 400 block of West Lemon Street.

When Gerhart and other officers arrived, they had the woman call her cell phone number.

Jones answered and told the woman "he wanted money, $185,000, to give her her phone back," Gerhart said.

The woman kept Jones on the line, stalling for time, as police tried to trace the suspect's location. "Who are you? Where are you? What do you want me to do?" she kept asking the man while trying to get him to lower the ransom amount.

The suspect agreed to a price of $200, and told the woman to meet him at the Harrisburg Avenue pedestrian walkway that connects Franklin and Marshall College and Doc Holliday's restaurant.

Gerhart and about four other officers from Platoon A accompanied the woman to the meeting point. When they saw Jones standing by a pillar on the campus side of the walkway, they moved in shortly after 2 a.m. and arrested the suspect at gunpoint.

Brian Poulin

Police: Man Arrested After Calling 911 For More Beer

POSTED: 1:25 pm EST November 6, 2007

A Hebron man was arrested Sunday after police said he called 911 several times, asking police to bring him beer.

Brian Poulin, 35, of 450 Church St., was charged with disorderly conduct.

Police said he called 911 numerous times and told police he was out of beer and asked them to pick up more for him.

Poulin was transported to Windham Community Memorial Hospital where Hebron Ambulance took him for treatment.

Police did not say what he was treated for.

He is scheduled to appear in Superior Court in Rockville on Nov. 20.

Copyright 2007 by NBC30.com.

Merry Christmas from the Gipper

What a Crock

So many of these annual awards are just an excuse for liberals to pat themselves on the back, an opportunity to promote their agendas or prop up their favorite dictators. Time's Man/Person of the Year is one of the prime examples. (Yes, I know, technically it's not an award -- but it's generally considered to be one). Another great example of what a farce these awards have become is giving gas-bag AlGore the Nobel Peace Prize. How does stumping for tree-huggers equate into world peace? The organization that has done more to promote world peace is the US Military -- not that those clowns on the Nobel committee would ever dream of considering them.

Here is a good piece on Putin's award from the WSJ:

Man of the Year?

By GARRY KASPAROV
December 22, 2007; Page A11

Ever since President Vladimir Putin took office eight long years ago, the political and media leadership of the West have had a full-time job trying to look on the bright side of Russia's rapid turn from democracy.

The free press has been demolished, elections are canceled and rigged, and then we hear how popular Mr. Putin is. Opposition marches are crushed, and we're told -- over and over -- how much better off we are today than in the days of the Soviet Union. This week Time magazine named Mr. Putin its 2007 "Person of the Year."

Vladimir Putin

Unfortunately, there is no silver lining to Russia's descent into dictatorship. If anything there is a look of iron to it.

Condoleezza Rice, hardly a Putin critic, said recently that Russia "is not an environment in which you can talk about free and fair elections." A good start, but this comment was not made where one would imagine -- perhaps at a press conference insisting that Putin's Russia be removed from the G-7 for making a mockery of democratic practices. No, her remark came as a side note to her very early endorsement of Mr. Putin's handpicked heir to the throne, Dmitry Medvedev.

The most revealing moment in Ms. Rice's comments came when the topic of Mr. Medvedev as the next president was first broached. The official transcript reads: "SECRETARY RICE: Well, I guess, they're still going to have an election in March. "

Perhaps my sense of humor was dulled during the five days I spent in a Moscow jail last month for protesting against these sham elections. Or maybe it was reading about the constant persecution of my fellow activists across the country that did it. Madam Secretary went on to speak approvingly of Mr. Medvedev, making the undemocratic nature of his selection sound like a minor annoyance. The last remaining element of democracy in Russia, the transition of power, will be destroyed. Will Mr. Putin and his successor still be welcomed with open arms in the club of leading democracies?

In the early days of our opposition activities last year, when members of Other Russia were harassed and arrested, the "bright siders" in the West said it could be worse. Later, when our marchers were badly beaten in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Mr. Putin's fans in the West said at least the police weren't killing us in the streets.

Last week, 22-year-old opposition activist Yury Chervochkin died in hospital after several weeks in a coma. He had been beaten nearly to death an hour after making an anxious cellphone call to our offices saying he was being followed by members of the organized-crime task force known as UBOP, which has become the vanguard of the Kremlin's war on political opposition. A witness saw him clubbed repeatedly by men with baseball bats.

Yury's sin was not chanting Nazi slogans or praising the deeds of Josef Stalin, activities that regularly go unremarked in Russia these days. No, he had been caught throwing leaflets that read "The elections are a farce!" That was enough to make him a marked man. Now, for agitating for real democracy in Russia, he is dead.

The stakes have been raised to the highest level, and what bright side will be found now? Where is the line that cannot be crossed without a serious response from the West? So far Mr. Putin hasn't found it -- and he has good reason to suspect such a line simply does not exist. It is for the leaders in Washington, D.C., Paris and Berlin to decide what it means to denounce the Russian elections as fraudulent, only to then embrace the winners as democratic partners.

Lesser tragedies than that of Yury Chervochkin are occurring on a regular basis in Russia today. Last week journalist Natalya Morar was denied entry into the country on secret orders of the FSB security force, after writing investigative articles on financial deals with Kremlin connections. Lyudmila Kharlamova, a political organizer for Other Russia, was arrested after heroin was planted among her possessions in Orenburg. Activist Andrei Grekhov suffered a similar fate in Rostov, though the police chose to plant bullets instead of drugs in his pockets.

This is a good opportunity to remember Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist who was murdered on Oct. 7, 2006, Putin's birthday. The police investigation into this infamous assassination has stalled and talk of it has died down. The Kremlin is counting on the same thing happening with "minor" cases like that of Yury Chervochkin.

In a recent speech, Mr. Putin said "the enemies of the state must be wiped out!" It has been made quite clear that by "enemies" he means anyone who opposes his total authority. It is no surprise that his words are taken at face value across the country, and acted on by security forces eager to prove their loyalty and enthusiasm.

The presidents and prime ministers of the West seem just as eager to bow down to the Kremlin and the great god of business as usual. Nicolas Sarkozy raced to congratulate Mr. Putin on his party's election victory, despite the overwhelming evidence of massive fraud at the polls. A few days later France's Renault picked up a 25% share in Russian automaker AvtoVaz, a purchase made from Sergei Chemezov and his arms-dealing company Rosoboronexport. Why should Mr. Putin and his oligarchs worry about democracy as long as the money keeps rolling in?

Time magazine, of course, took obvious pains to explain that its award to Mr. Putin is "not an endorsement" and that it goes to the person who made the most news "for better or for worse." Nonetheless the article praises Mr. Putin for restoring his country to prominence in the international arena, dispelling "anarchy" and recovering national pride. The magazine does express concern about his "troubling" record on human rights.

The same things could have been said about Adolf Hitler in 1938, when he took his turn as Time's Man of the Year. "Fascism," Time wrote then, "has discovered that freedom -- of press, speech, assembly -- is a potential danger to its own security." Again these words apply equally well to this year's winner.

Most of the criticism leveled against Mr. Putin regards "alleged" abuses or comes directly from known critics. This abdicates the journalist's role to report the facts as facts.

Consider the timing of this announcement, right after the counterfeit parliamentary elections that added to Mr. Putin's record of eradicating democracy across Russia. The Time article will be trumpeted by Kremlin propaganda as an endorsement of Mr. Putin's policies. The man on the street will be told that even America, constantly blasted by the Kremlin as an enemy, has been forced to recognize the president's greatness.

Internationally, the focus will be on the myth that Mr. Putin has built a "strong Russia." In fact he and his cronies have hollowed out the state from within. Most of the power now resides in the super-corporations like Gazprom and Rosneft, and among the small group of loyalists who run them.

The Putin regime has taken Russia from a frail democracy to an efficient mafia state. It was an impressive balancing act -- behaving like a tyrant while at the same time staying in the good graces of the West.

After each crackdown, with no significant international reaction forthcoming, Mr. Putin knew it was safe to take another step. As ever, appeasement in the name of realpolitik only encourages would-be dictators. And such moral weakness inevitably leads to very real costs in human life.

Mr. Kasparov is a former world chess champion and a leader of The Other Russia, a pro-democracy coalition. He is the author of "How Life Imitates Chess," recently published by Bloomsbury USA.

That's the Way the Cookie Crumbles
nyuk, nyuk

I'm Sooo Happy
well, not really

Interesting piece from yesterday's WSJ. Very timely for this time of year. Despite what our culture tells us -- that lots of nice expensive presents will make us happy.

The Happiness Myth

By STEVE SALERNO
December 20, 2007; Page A17

One morning when I was 13, I elbowed my father as he got ready for work. "Dad," I said, "are you happy?" For a long moment he stared at me. Then he replied, "Son, a man doesn't have time to think about that. A man just does what needs doing." He gave me one of his you'll-understand-someday smiles, and left.

I've been thinking about that exchange a lot, now that another kind of exchange -- the gift-giving kind -- is upon us. If recent traditions hold, a fair percentage of those gifts will be "inspirational" materials that extol the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment. Certain to end up under the trees of at least some Americans who don't already own it is that unparalleled tribute to wishful thinking, "The Secret," by Rhonda Byrne. The year's blockbuster best-seller-cum-cultural phenomenon sold six million books and DVDs on the strength of the belief that you can imagine your way to total fulfillment.

Some of the season's hottest inspiration books, though not "how-to" in format, sell a similar message. Notable is Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love," the story of one woman's (literal) journey to happiness, in which she decided to forsake the comfort of her known life for regions uncharted. "Eat, Pray, Love" reached the top of the best-seller lists after being blessed by Oprah. Self-help guru Tony Robbins, too, has lately been spamming his online community with holiday offers. Various Robbins products, and even tickets to his entry-level seminars on personal reinvention, will likely end up as stocking-stuffers.

If the quest for joy doesn't take center stage at Christmas, it will surely pop up the following week. Typically, New Year's resolutions that don't involve weight loss have something to do with embracing change, choosing happiness, following your dreams, etc. We are consumed by the pursuit of happiness.

That's too bad. Because it's that very pursuit -- as currently framed -- that may prevent you from finding happiness, or at least a passable facsimile.

Now, I'm not contending that Dad's stoic machismo is what life ought to be about -- for either gender. But a lot of us seemed a lot happier, or at least less restless, before the Happiness Movement began bullying us. Myrna Blyth, a longtime editor in chief of Ladies' Home Journal, made this point explicitly in her 2004 book, "Spin Sisters." Ms. Blyth undertook an informal study of the themes in women's magazines as they evolved over recent decades, and concluded that what women have mostly gotten from their magazines is the message that they're never quite happy enough -- never good enough, never fulfilled enough, never far enough along on the path to "having it all."

Of course, it's not just women's magazines that do this. With highly visible gurus of personal development fanning the flames, an entire generation has come of age believing that perpetual happiness is a birthright. Over the past four decades, the concepts of Empowerment and Entitlement, first-cousins in the family of American psychobabble, have conspired to produce what New York Observer writer Alexandra Wolfe labels "the most coddled generation in American history." We once laughed at the excesses of the "Me Generation," the malignant narcissism epitomized in the TV show "Seinfeld." If we don't laugh quite as much these days, that's because it's not caricature anymore. It's life as we live it.

Contrary to what you hear from Oprah, not "everything you want in life" is attainable (unless, maybe, you are Oprah). Consider the staple line from school administrators during self-esteem-boosting student-assemblies: "In this great country, you can even be president, if you want!" While technically it's true that anybody can be president, it is not true that everybody can be president. Yet that's the implication. In my own case, growing up in Brooklyn, I wanted desperately to patrol center field for the Dodgers. Alas, I had millions of young competitors, some of whom had actual major league skills. If that is your dream -- the only dream that will make you happy -- what do you do when the Dodgers fail to call?

We know what some of us do, perhaps, when our plans don't work out. The years between 1960 and 1999, the period of the most intense "coddling," saw a tripling in suicides among people aged 15 to 24. (For every "successful" suicide, 100 to 200 young people attempt it.) Increasingly, those who don't kill themselves find alternative ways of escaping reality. Today, almost one-fifth of people under age 20 confess to binge drinking. Millions of others descend on doctors, seeking prescriptions for Prozac, Xanax and the like. Although it's reckless to draw straight-line links of causation, is it not possible that these grim facts represent, in part, what happens when people raised on pie-in-the-sky brainwashing run up against the hard truths of an unforgiving world and can't cope?

Here's something else Dad told me: "Life isn't built around 'fun.' It's built around peace of mind." Maybe Dad sensed the paradox of happiness: Those most desperate for it run a high risk of being the last to find it. That's because they make foolish decisions. They live disorderly lives, always chasing the high of the moment.

Perhaps happiness is best viewed as an ongoing marathon rather than a succession of disconnected sprints. It's a long-term commitment that sometimes calls for sacrifice and self-denial, compromise and conciliation. Above all, happiness may mean knowing when to quit -- to settle for "just OK." That is a very unpopular message in these empowered times.

My father didn't have it all, but I believe he was at peace with himself and the life he led. Shouldn't that be enough for any of us?

Mr. Salerno is author of "SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless," (Crown, 2005). He is now writing a book on vanity's role in American life.

In fact, there's really only one thing, one person (well, Three Persons :-), who can bring true happiness.

As St. Thomas says in his Prayer of Thanksgiving After Mass:

And I pray that You will lead me, a sinner,
to the banquet where you,
with Your Son and holy Spirit,
are true and perfect light,
total fulfillment,
everlasting joy,
gladness without end,
and perfect happiness to your saints.