THOSE WACKY WEGISWATORS

Legislators in Alabama, Iowa, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia are working on laws to deny driver's licenses to high school dropouts.


That's just what this country needs: uneducated teens who can't drive to work.

VOLUNTEERS, ANYONE?

Some Afghan police are collecting an "Islamic tax." The tax is ten percent of whatever you've got. 


Police say the tax is voluntary. Those who decline to volunteer can be beaten into a coma with rifle butts, as has happened.


This, too, is voluntary.

CREATIVE ACCOUNTING

Groupon had an operating loss of $420 million last year.  But the company says its "adjusted consolidated segment operating income" was $60.6 million.


Or as The New York Times puts it, "The world would be richer if Groupon's notions of accounting caught on."

THE SCENT OF A MAN

Schick has announced the world's first men's scented razor, the Schick Xtreme3 Refresh disposable.


It smells like spearmint, citrus and rosemary.


Is that what a man smells like?  I wouldn't know; I'm a Gillette man myself.

FALLING SKIES

Last month a woman took a deadly dive from University Towers, a high rise apartment building couple blocks from me. Police called it suicide.


This week a man took the lethal plunge. Police say his wife helped him, they call it murder.


My neighborhood is becoming a hard hat zone.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Fired Tulsa Police Officer Eric Hill testified in the federal trial of his former boss, retired Tulsa Police Corporal Harold Wells, who is charged, among other things, with planting dope on drug suspects.


Hill testified, "The general philosophy that was taught to us by Corporal Wells is that you keep the guilty guilty and never make the innocent guilty."


How comforting. 

QUOTABLE

"He who warned, uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh, by ringin' those bells and, um, makin' sure as he's ridin' his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that, uh, we were gonna be secure and, and we were gonna be free and we were gonna be armed."

-- Sarah Palin on the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian died today at the age of 83.

Of natural causes.

...IF YOU'VE GOT 'EM

China has banned smoking in public places. But the law carries no penalty. 


That's my kind of law.

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS ... WHO?

The Ku Klux Klan and the Westboro Baptist Church protested against each other at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day.


Sometimes it's hard to know which side to root for.

READ IT AND WEEP

Here's a piece of the most lunatic letter to the editor this week, from my local newspaper "The Tulsa World."

"The electoral college needs to be abandoned before the 2012 election. If not, the 'governmental dependent' will elect him again. We cannot stand another four years of Obama's liberal ideas. In the 2008 election, the number of states won by McCain - 29; by Obama - 19; square miles of land won by McCain - 2,427,000, by Obama - 580,000; and population of counties won by McCain - 143 million, by Obama - 127. The land area won by McCain was owned by taxpaying U.S. citizens, Obama carried the inner-city welfare areas."

Since Barack Obama won the popular vote, it's hard to see how abolishing the electoral college would have changed things. Perhaps if the vote were limited to white male landowners, as our founding fathers intended...?

On Monday, murder suspect and Snohomish County, Washington, jail inmate Joshua Monson stabbed his lawyer in the neck with a pencil.


On Friday he was assigned a new lawyer who he then stabbed with a pencil.


Monson remains in jail awaiting a new lawyer.

There will be no Samuel Clem\ens Cove on Lake Tahoe.

Clemens, aka Mark Twain, camped on the shores of the lake and wrote about it in his book "Roughing It."

But the U.S. Board on Geographic Names turned down a proposal to name a cove after him, noting that Clemens also accidently started a forest fire there 150 years ago.

Some things you just don't forget.

QUOTABLE

"The Republicans were so pleased by the Osama bin Laden raid that today they granted President Obama full citizenship."

-- David Letterman

SUICIDE IS PAINLESS, IT BRINGS SO MANY CHANGES

Doctor assisted suicide is legal in the states of Montana, Oregon and Washington. But if your health insurance doesn't cover the procedure, there are do-it-yourself kits.

The Gladd Group of La Mesa, California sells a popular one by mail. For $60 you get:

• a plastic bag for your head to go in. 
• and a plastic tube to attach the bag to a tank of helium.
• The tank is extra. Get it from a party supply store, hook it up, and your party's over.

Gladd sells up to 60 of these kits a month to people all over the world, 30 this year to Oregon alone. 

Of course, they don't get a lot of repeat customers.

When a serial killer is caught, reporters always interview his clueless neighbors who say things like "I had no idea. He seemed so normal. He was quiet ad kept to himself but he was a nice guy, and he liked cats."

And so it was with Osama bin Laden. His neighbors in the quiet suburban neighborhood in Abbottabad, Pakistan didn't know bin Laden lived in the biggest compound on the street, but they'd met the men who lived there and said they were model neighbors who were polite and never caused trouble.

When the neighborhood children lost a ball over the compound wall, the men didn't return it. But they paid 50 rupees for a new ball. And when the kids threw balls into the compound to make more money, the men paid them, 50 rupees a ball.

And I bet they liked cats.


(New York Times)

HELL HATH NO FURY

Here in Tulsa, an 18 year old high school girl kicked in the front door of her ex-boyfriend's apartment, stabbed him several times, threw a pan of hot grease on him and shot at him.

This is one girl you don't want to break up with.

BREAKING NEWS

Osama bin dead for a day now.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"No one is happier -- no one is prouder -- to put this birth certificate matter to rest than 'The Donald' and that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like 'Did we fake the moon landing?'”

-- President Barack at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

THE WOMAN MADE HIM DO IT

Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of assassinating Robert Kennedy before a roomful of witnesses, has finally explained what happened that day in 1968.

In new legal papers his lawyers have filed in court, Sirhan says a woman in a polka-dot dress used mind control on him. Besides, Sirhan says, none of his bullets killed Kennedy; he was just a diversion for the real shooter.

So, then, I guess that explains it.