Thanks to semi-retired blogger David Crisp, we find a rather unique YAMB, Evangelina Duke, who is blogging her experiences as Miss Montana.

It took me a while to warm up to this show, but my goodness, it’s funny.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s a game show (I think) filmed in Japan, then dubbed into English.

It’s loaded with double entendres and horrible puns, but it’s just hilarious.

My Saturday morning routine is like this (with some parts excised because this is, after all, a family blog): Get out of bed, stumble into kitchen, start coffee, check email.

Usually, I don’t get much of anything — even the hate mail has slowed up some. I must be losing my touch.

Anyway, I’ve been using the Google News alerts to email me links when certain events happen. It’s very cool, and only rarely sends irrelevant items.

I expected to get at least one alert this morning, as related to my earlier post so I didn’t pay too much attention to it when I first opened the alert. I clicked on the article, and began to compose the previous post.

As is my habit, I’ll often click over to read something else in the middle of a post while I try to get my thoughts together. (All two of them.) So, I went back to my mail client (Thunderbird, in case you were wondering) and read the rest of the alerts.

There was one entitled, ”Doctor faces murder charges for ‘mercy killings’.” Mercy killings? Ennis?

Long story short (yeah, right), it was the doctor who used to practice in our local clinic before he hung out his own shingle. I always thought of him as mainly goofy, and a borderline quack, so I guess I’m not overly surprised now that I’ve had a couple hours or so to digest the news.

My first reaction was an out loud, “Oh my God.”

The odd thing is that the incident was right around a year ago, in the same time frame as Jamie’s murder. Give or take a little bit, but given the previous murder rate (essentially zero since the beginning of time) in Ennis, that’s quite a coincidence. (Later article indicates that the euthanasia occurred in 2000.)

In reading the article, I get the distinct impression that he knew what he was doing, and went ahead and did it.

But Bischoff said charges weren’t filed earlier because none of the family members were willing to testify against him.

[. . .]

“I gave her a shot to make her feel more comfortable and ease her suffering,” he said. “Three or four of her family members wrote me thank you letters.” (Emphasis mine. –Ed.)

This is just bizarre.

[UPDATE: 12:26]:  It gets more horrifying:

Bischoff’s federally controlled substance registration was suspended on June 28 after the Drug Enforcement Agency concluded that he had written prescriptions for himself for drugs, including the narcotic painkiller Oxycontin, and couldn’t account for some 32,000 doses of controlled substances.

Bischoff also is charged with felony counts of fraudulently obtaining dangerous drugs, criminal distribution of dangerous drugs and criminal possession with intent to distribute dangerous drugs.

The charges claim that Bischoff obtained 48,000 dosage units of drugs including Adderall - a stimulant used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder - and narcotic painkillers without diagnosed and documented medical need between September 2002 and 2003. Bischoff allegedly obtained the drugs with telephone orders that were delivered to his residence.

[. . .]

Last spring, Kenneth and Connie Sciuchetti accepted a $250,000 judgment from Bischoff and the Madison Valley Hospital after their son, Douglas, died in August 1999 under Bischoff’s care.

Court records said Sciuchetti checked into the hospital with severe back pain. He had earlier been involved in an industrial accident in Spokane, Wash. While in the hospital, the patient was prescribed a number of drugs by Bischoff that, according to a coroner’s report, eventually killed him, said the court records.

This is just absolutely shocking. I’m thankful that neither the Spousal Unit™ nor I were ever under his care.

I guess this will likely be my last post on the subject, since George Davis ended up getting life in prison with no chance of parole.

[Doug] Clark was downtown that early morning. He walked out a door just in time to hear a gunshot and see his son, Jamie Roberts, 27, fall to the ground mortally wounded. The next moment, he found himself dragging a friend back into a bar after the man was shot in the stomach.

Clark gave his son CPR and helped load him into a pickup truck to transport him to hospital, where he died.

On Friday, Clark stared into the eyes of the man who held the pistol and told him about lives torn apart by grief.

“I hate you for what you did to me, my family, friends and the entire Ennis community,” Clark told Davis at the hearing. “I, Douglas P. Clark, will never forgive you.”

[. . .]

“I will never be the same person that I was since you, George Davis, shattered and tore one of the biggest holes in my heart, for which there is no repair,” Jamie Roberts’ mother, Sharon Clark said. “I feel that you also killed me that horrible night of June 14, 2003. You, George Davis, killed my one and only son.”

“Jamie was one of the kindest, outgoing, happy-go-lucky people anyone would want to be around,” said Sharon Clark. “Jamie liked to make the whole world laugh and be happy. Jamie had no enemies.”

[. . .]

“You have no remorse for what you did or what you have caused and I cannot understand that,” said Katy Clark. “The only reason I can come up with is because you are the devil. The devil is the only person who acts the way you do today.”

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle has more.

Except for the appeals, which I’m sure will commence shortly, everthing seems to be said and done.

I hope that the Clarks can begin to heal. Hate is a terrible thing to have to carry around. If you hang on to it for too long, it begins to own and define you. I’ve known Doug and Sharon Clark for a lot of years, and its hard for me to imagine those words coming out of their mouths.

I might have been able to work up the most miniscule amount of sympathy for Davis had he admitted some culpability in the matter. Instead, he blamed the whole incident on being off his Paxil. Am I surprised? Not really.

At the end, I’m left with the feeling I had when I first heard about it, ”I think this will be solved pretty quickly, but I doubt that it will ever make sense.”

Today, George Davis will be (I guess “has been” by this time) sentenced for the June 2003 shootings in Ennis that left a young man dead, and a family without a father.

God may have mercy on him; I’m rather hoping that the court doesn’t.

I don’t know what, if any, relevance it has, but Madison County Attorney Bob Zenker used to work for Judge Loren Tucker back when Judge Loren Tucker was plain old Madison County Attorney Loren Tucker and Bob Zenker was Assitant County Attorney Bob Zenker.

Interesting, no?

Take subject lines from Spam, mix it together with bare-bones cartoons, and what do you get?

Spamusement!

(Thanks to Jack Bog’s Blog.)

…is paved with good intentions…

Socialism always ends up hurting us in the long run. Russell Kirk once said, “Those who promise us a terrestrial heaven invariably give us a terrestrial hell.” Social Security is the promise of financial security in retirement. It’s the perfect safety net. Well, it may have been for a couple generations, but it won’t be for much longer – definitely not for my generation (Gen X). Check out what Alan Greenspan said yesterday about the third rail of American politics…

Greenspan urges Congress to slash Social Security benefits

What do we do Chuck? I’m quite certain you’ll say raise taxes. If you think the “trust fund” will help, consider that there is not a dime of money in the “trust fund,” just a bunch of IOUs. And, it’s Democrats AND Republicans spending that revenue on general gov’t programs. Get out of the business of fighting wars? Heck, the cost of the war doesn’t even come close to covering the unfunded liability of Social Security and Medicare – about $44 trillion over 75 years.

Situation:

You have a wildly successful product, and the revenue is just rolling in.

An independent operator comes up with an innovation that could potentially make your service even more popular.

What do you do?

a.) Hire him before anyone else (possibly one of your competitors) can snatch him up.

-or-

b.) Sic the lawyers on him.

I think you know the answer.

Do you think the Guess-At-It editorial board will be voting for Kerry?

This piece is a fairly standard “Call. It. Off.”^* piece, with all the requisite calls to stop smearing a veteran’s war record, and for President Bush to muzzle the 527’s, namely the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. (At least I’m assuming that’s the specific organization, since I could find no mention of Soros’ groups.)

I wonder how they feel about MoveOn.Org and Michael Moore’s ”documentary?” I searched the Gazette archives, and I could find no official editorial position on the lies that were propagated in that piece of…ahem…campaign propaganda, although Ed Kemmick did write a column on the films lack of facts.

In looking at the situation of the SBVfT vs. Senator Kerry, it seems very clear to me that if Kerry’s record is so unequivocal on this, why hasn’t he signed a form to release his records? If it were me, I’d be signing that form .02 seconds after the ad first aired.

I don’t think we’ll see the end of attack ads, even if we were to abolish all 527’s since attack ads have proven to be singularly effective. What’s happening now are the obvious unintended consequences of McCain-Feingold, which anyone could see coming. To my way of thinking, money is something like running water — if you try to divert it or prevent it from going somewhere it’s already been, you’ll only succeed in making it take a different path to its eventual destination. It’ll end up in more or less the same place, serving more or less the same purpose.

A man lost his jaw to cancer, and doctors have grown a new jawbone on his back, and reattached it.

This is totally amazing. When I was in high school, I had a friend who was a fiend for Copenhagen. I used to ask him if he was worried about getting cancer. “Nah,” he replied, “by the time I get cancer, they will have found something to fix it.” Looks like he wasn’t too far off!

It’s one thing to use yourself to regrow your own bones, but it seems to me just a hop, skip and not even a jump to be growing bones in someone else’s body, too.

Maybe I watched too much weird sci-fi as a kid, but along with finding this exciting, I also find it a little unsettling.

It’s long been a shibboleth that economic conditions are directly linked to crime rates. If there is an area where there is more crime, it is necessarily because there is an economic downturn.

As it turns out, that may not be the case.

This is one of those stories that is sad and uplifting all at the same time.

The Padden siblings don’t sugarcoat their opinion of their mother:

Some think she was chemically unbalanced. Others think Mildred Radcliff was selfish and irresponsible.

All agree that her actions were just plain cruel.

It’s understandable that when they talk about her anger surfaces in their voices: This is a woman who gave birth to at least 17 children and abandoned nearly all of them.

The state of Montana was left in charge of the rest.

It’s worth a read.

Anyone who has small children knows: When you go on a road trip of any length, always make sure the kids go potty.

As adults, we probably do it out of habit, just because we might be in the car a long time.

You might want to take the time and be extra careful, and make sure all your pipes or clear; lest you hit an emergency situation, and end up facing charges for answering nature’s call!

If plugging the crapper is a crime, I know some people who should be put away for life!

Here’s a great LTE that ran in the latest edition of the Outpost…

From our weekly newspaper, the Outpost…

Both parties to blame

Dear Friends of the Constitutional Republic,
Both of the two major parties are responsible and guilty for the economic, budgetary mess we are in, and this is documented in detail in a new book by Peter G. Peterson titled “Running On Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It” (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux).

Mr. Peterson has been the chairman of several corporations and he was President Nixon’s Secretary of Commerce.

In a review of this book in the “New York Times,” Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at “The Weekly Standard” magazine, notes that the annual current account deficit - what America has to borrow to finance its excess of imports over exports - is a dangerously high $540 billion. Our net financial liabilities to foreigners have risen to $2.6 trillion, from zero in 1980.

For decades, Peterson is quoted as saying, Democrats “labored patiently to purge America of its traditional aversion to deficits,” bribing voters with jobs and social services programs that the country could not afford …. Dependent on deficit spending, both parties have blown through every institutional constraint erected against reckless tax cuts and benefit expansions.

Caldwell says that while Peterson blames both parties for conniving against fiscal common sense, he puts the present administration in a class of its own. Paraphrasing what Peterson says in his book, Caldwell adds:

“George W. Bush has discarded traditional Republican qualms against big government, replacing the old Democratic model of tax-and-spend with his own model of borrow-and-spend.”

Peterson is quoted directly as saying:

This administration and the Republican Congress have presided over the biggest, most reckless deterioration of America’s finances in history (emphasis mine).

In other words, forget the debate about whether Mr. Bush and his administration have been conservative. In terms of their fiscal irresponsibility, and what the GOP used to stand for, they are not even Republicans!

Caldwell concludes his review by citing a quote used by Peterson, from Thomas Jefferson: “To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.”

So, what can Americans do about all this?

Well, one thing is obvious: Stop voting for Democrats or Republicans. Do not vote for Bush/Cheney or Kerry/Edwards. They will only make our budget mess a bigger mess.

Vote for me for president and Dr. Chuck Baldwin for Vice President, and for other Constitution Party candidates. We are the only party that stands for government that is truly godly, constitutional and fiscally responsible.

For God, Family and the Republic,

Michael A. Peroutka

Millersville, Md.
_______________

I’ve often made this argument myself. To wit, here’s my LTE that ran in the 3-1-03 Gazette…

Reading stories about how much the U.S. Congress is going to spend for the next fiscal year is rather exasperating. As if the prospect of a bigger and more intrusive government isn’t bad enough, my frustration on the matter is compounded by the fact that the Republican Party, the so-called party of less government, is leading the charge on bloated government spending. Even more irksome is the notion held by many Republicans that more spending means more compassion.

Why is it that when Republicans gain power they feel an irrepressible need to increase government spending? We can trust that Democrats, whether in power or not, invariably want to increase spending. Republicans, however, seem to reserve this itch for times when they maintain control of the process, exactly when you expect them to stick to their principles. A spending frenzy is particularly vexing from a party that espouses principles such as lower taxes, balanced budgets, less government, more freedom, etc.

Moreover, the notion held by many leaders of the Republican Party that increased spending is a reflection of compassion lacks both principle and any regard toward sound public policy. Where is the compassion in using the force of law to take the fruits of one citizen’s labor to give it to another? That isn’t compassion; it’s legalized theft! Let me suggest that “compassionate conservatism” is merely double-speak for Republican-style liberalism.

The stark reality is that much of the problem can be traced to the prevailing attitudes of the American people. In most respects, Americans have traded individual responsibility for entitlements, freedom for security, a constitutional republic for majoritarian democracy. Let’s face it, the prevailing political ideology in our country borders on socialism. That being the case, spending increases that ransom my future and the future of my children and grandchildren shouldn’t surprise me, no matter which party is the culprit.

…are playing a round one day, and one tells the other about his great new ball.

“If you knock it into the rough, it starts beeping so you can hear it. If it goes into the water, it has a flotation device. Plus, it’s brightly colored, so that you can see it wherever it lands on the fairway.”

“Wow,” his buddy says, “that sounds great. Where’d you get it?”

“I found it.”