Justice for red-light runners

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Daily Observer

If Chicago can raise $50 million a year using 100 cameras to catch red-light runners, I’m for the city putting in another 100. Or more. Same for the suburbs that are thinking about putting in the cameras.

Yes, we’re supposed to feel sympathy for motorists who race through red rights, as if they’re a picked-on species that is being victimized by the money-hungry Daley administration.

It’s not fair; it’s not constitutional, the ticketed public whimpers. Some lawyer, of course, has filed a class action suit, protesting—what?—a motorist’s right to speed through a red light undetected.

Read more: The Chicago Daily Observer

How many angels can dance on a plastic bag?

Chicago Business News, Analysis & Articles | City trashes plastic bags at farmers markets | Crain's

Has anyone actually calculated precisely how much room plastic bags take up in landfills, or how much it costs to "landfill" them? I doubt it, but what does it matter. Plastic bags now are out and "biodegradable" bags now are in.

But wait, as this Crain's Chicago Business article explains, super environmentalists aren't so sure about the "biodegradable" bags, because they might encourage littering, and are more expensive (thus, of course, "penalizing those least able to afford them").

So, one farmer will begin selling $5 cloth bags, less than it costs to make them. But wait! Has he calculated the environmental cost of cloth bags? The environmental destruction caused raising, harvesting and processing all that cotton--the fertilizers and the run-off, the carbon footprint caused by cotton processing and weaving, and so forth?

Maybe we should go back to paper bags. But wait: How many trees are killed? How many rivers polluted by paper plants?

Maybe we all should just stay in bed.

"Activists" secure a lifetime guarantee of cash

More that's wrong with the the housing "rescue" bill and how the special interests cash in:

President Bush is poised to sign the housing and Fannie Mae bailout bill, after the Senate passed it with 72 votes on the weekend. But an underreported part of this story is that Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to allow a vote on Republican Jim DeMint's amendment to bar political donations and lobbying by Fannie and its sibling, Freddie Mac.

Read more: Fannie Mae's Political Immunity - WSJ.com