Across the Great Divide

Not Feeling as Good as You Used to?

A Bluestem Prairie has noted a striking (i.e., word-for-word) similarity between the new message adopted by the House Republicans and a trademarked slogan for a drug "used primarily for the treatment of depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and panic disorder in adults."

The Change You Deserve.

Since Wyeth owns the trademark and the cure for the anxiety we've been feeling, I have to assume the Republican product is a placebo.

With recognition coming in from big national blogs, Ollie doesn't need this link from me. But I'll bet my readers do.

The President as Superfan.

Spot has already taken Michael Gerson to task for his characterization of the "Obama narrative [as] intellectual and ideological (not social) elitism." Voters want a goober, not an egghead, for president.

A president is expected to be a patriotic symbol himself, not the arbiter of patriotic symbols. He is supposed to be the face-painted superfan at every home game; to wear red, white and blue boxers on special marital occasions; to get misty-eyed during the most obscure patriotic hymns.

I guess having a president as superfan works well, as long as your affairs don't extend much beyond the Nebraska-Iowa State game.

There ought to be an Constitutional amendment, in fact, just to make sure we don't accidentally hire another smart guy to do the hardest job in the world.

Great guy to have a beer with? Not a bad qualification for my insurance agent, golf pro, bike mechanic and dentist. But I wouldn't pick a president on that basis, or an airline pilot or a brain surgeon. (I hope those dudes with the painted-on skeleton ribs joined in front aren't, like, pre-med.)

Gerson doesn't get Obama, as is clear from this lame comparison.

Obama is easily the most religiously fluent and informed Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter. But, over time, Obama has assumed a much more familiar, Democratic electoral profile — the candidate of the young, the educated and the secular (he has consistently won religiously nonaligned voters), who also gets nearly universal support from African-Americans. He increasingly resembles Bill Bradley or Gary Hart — a candidate of new liberalism — with this additional element of black enthusiasm.

Is churchliness all the evangelical Gerson can see that Carter and Obama have in common? And black enthusiasm all that separates Obama from a few liberal also rans? 

Carter, of course, also got near universal support from African-Americans and received a huge boost with younger voters from Hunter S. Thompson's Rolling Stone profile. I imagine Carter got more than his share of the young, educated and secular voters, too. The real difference is not in where their support comes from, their religion, or even their less warlike, more internationalist perspective. Carter's intelligence led him to  micromanage; Obama's seems geared toward enlisting other hearts and minds.

Folksiness has its uses, and genuine empathy is a great quality in a leader. But ultimately, I want my president to be a good decision maker, and there, intellectual rigor and vigor matter, not how just many people voted for the inner good old boy.

After the War Room.

I'm running with this because it's so brilliant — not to be anti-Clinton — but ouch!

Via A Tiny Revolution [h/t The Mississippifarian]

Across an Even Greater Divide.

If I ever change the name of this blog, I'm thinking Quimby's Zen Cleaners and Alterations.

For Brodkorb is an Honorable Man.

I speak not to disprove what Brodkorb spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
I read his words and ask, what sort of man wrote this?

When the story broke that on Minnesota Democrats Exposed that Al Franken hadn’t paid his workers compensation premiums for three years, Team Franken denied it. It wasn’t until the State of New York made it clear that not only hadn’t Franken paid his premiums, but that someone had apparently blown off more than a dozen letters – including a signed, certified letter telling him to pay his premiums, and then telling him to pay a $25,000 fine.

Oh yes, the labored syntax at the start
Might signify that this could be our man.
Self-reference and scarlet typography —
How could such a constant drone be plagiary?
For Franken hath transgressed against the state
While Brodkorb is an honorable man.

And yet, this alien diction
This length, so lexically complex
The Gunning-Fog near triple what we've come to know
And loathe. Analysis,
Algorithmic, doth suggest
That someone else hath spoken in his stead.
But Brodkorb is an honorable man.

Not faithful readers, nor patrons, nor keepers,
Not buttboys, Publii nor seraphim
No caries nor cadres nor campaigners
Could put words in this man's mouth.
For Brodkorb is an honorable man.

My ethics are not governed by legal interpretations.
I am continually aware of my responsibility to disclose.
Any attempt to connect Me to any political or non-political clients
Is ridiculous,
For Brodkorb is an honorable man.

Alas, I have no documents or facts
To prove another authorship or attribution lax.
I've come to doubt my congeries of hacks
For Brodkorb is an honorable man.

[h/t Joe Bodell, who first noticed a certain stylistic inconsistency]

Punish the Monkey.

They’re driving long nails into coffins
You’ve been having sleepless nights
You’ve gone as quiet as a church mouse
and checking on your rights
The boss has hung you out to dry
And it looks as though
they’ll punish the monkey
and let the organ grinder go

— "Punish the Monkey," Mark Knopfler

Why I Hate Advertising: Free Oxygen in the Passenger Compartment of Every Car!

Who  knew sparkling beverages could be hydrating?

It's true. All beverages hydrate, including sparkling beverages. So if you are looking for hydration, but want the delicious and refreshing taste you get from Coca-Cola, don't compromise—go for it! You'll be hydrating your body with each and every sip.

— Packaging copy on each and every Diet Cherry Coke 12 pack

Somehow, I'd missed this truly stupid bit of promotional writing until riding home today with a couple 12 packs turned over in the basket.

It's true. A product that is about 99.9% water has a hydrating effect. So do fruits and vegetables. So, I suppose, does the blood of virgins. Diet Coke, more hydrating than the blood of virgins. Conveniently available in more places. And more refreshing, too.

This is not a particularly useful public health bulletin, even for idiots, because it only covers beverages. They  might want to know the hydration effects of other liquids. For example, if they can't find a delicious and refreshing Coca-Cola product, which of these other trusted brands could provide the hydrating benefits they deserve?

Curel Therapeutic Moisturizing Lotion? Yes, "moisturizing lotion" sounds hydrating, doesn't it? And if you picked Curel, it's true. Refreshing, hydrating water is its most plentiful ingredient!

Ortho Weed B Gon? Congratulations! If you picked Weed B Gon, you are on the right track! It packs a whopping 92% of non-active ingredients. Most of which you will recognize as hydrating water. Plus, it kills chickweed, clover and creeping charlie.

409 Antibacterial All-Purpose Cleaner? But you have a big thirst. And your body is crying for relief. So go for it! 409 is 99.7% stuff your body can use in a hydrating way! Plus, it's antibacterial!

Apparently, the copy formerly promoted soft drinks, but maybe some marketing genius said, "Wait a minute! Soft drinks sounds... soft... flabby. We want to promote a fun, active, healthful life style. Plus, what about my product line, DASANI Plus? It's an Enhanced Water Beverage — not a soft drink."

You can learn more about the wonderful effects of Coca-Cola products at Coke's website, where there's a Hydration Calculator to help you estimate your hydration needs.

For example, if you are a 45-year-old male who weighs 175 pounds, you need 125 ounces of daily hydration from food and beverages, whereas, a 90-year old, 300-pound  male would need 125 ounces. Age 19 and only 120 pounds? You need 125 ounces, 13 ounces more when you were 18, so be sure to drink up.

You can even calculate the impact of exercise on your hydration needs. If skinny boy bikes for an hour (the longest ride the calculator can handle), he'll need another 8 ounces.

Now, as reader of this blog instead of product packaging, you're probably  already thinking: "Wait a minute. Isn't the caffeine in many Coke products a diuretic? So instead of hydrating, it flushes fluids from the system?"

According to this research into the effects of caffeinated drinks on athletic performance:

When no exercise was carried out, caffeine acted as a strong diuretic, hiking urine production by a torrential 31 per cent. However, it was a different story altogether during actual cycling. As the cyclists pedalled along, the use of a caffeinated sports drink didn't boost urine output at all, compared to drinking the caffeine-free beverage. In addition, caffeine had no effect on heart rate, body temperature, or perceived effort. This was in spite of the fact that the athletes were swallowing the equivalent of two cups of coffee per hour during their three-hour exertions.

You're welcome.

Mock Ads: McCain Swift Boated.

The Worst Political Ads in America Awards are coming Wednesday, May 21st. Sen. John McCain helps out with this weekend's reminder, appearing in a pair of ad parodies, plus an attack ad from the Ron Paul campaign.

And a special bonus clip...

Starting Over on the American Dream.

During the first quarter of the year, properties identified in the survey as "lender-mediated listings" represented more than a fifth of all houses on the market and more than one in four home sales in the 13-county metro area.
— "Distressed properties dragging home values down," Star Tribune

First, we just wanted to get into an apartment where we couldn't smell some one else's cooking and didn't hear the couple downstairs fighting. We found one, and the landlord let us refinish the floors ourselves.

Then, it was to own a house with the same classic wood work and to stop having to park on the street. It seems incredible today, but the owner let us in before the closing to strip the wallpaper and window coverings and paint.

Next, a little cabin up north, designed by a friend (now architect to the titans) for $400 and built for less than $20k.

A nicer house in a better neighborhood followed. We fixed it up more to our liking.

Having learned a lot, we repeated the remodeling process over time with a solid, inner suburban ranch on a creek. Unloaded the cabin.

Finally, we built a house from scratch, the way we wanted, near family out west. It's designed so we can die, dry up and blow away there.

We've been more fortunate than most Americans, steadily improving our living circumstances, always in a place we liked and could afford. Maybe the housing situation now is just having a stutter step, or maybe the change for the next generations will be more profound as they try to move up from humble circumstances.

Recently, a lot of people have gone backwards. Or maybe they were heading backwards all along and just couldn't see it as the housing market escalated toward the bubble. Now, they're starting over, or worse.

Yesterday, I realized there's a rung on the dream ladder we'll never ascend — scraping a $3.5 million house off a corner lake shore lot and starting over.

Anonymous Left-Leaning Blogger Almost Breaks Story!

Ollie at A Bluestem Prairie already posted about the Strib story on the accounting woes of the State  GOP, and she fills in the blank, naming the anonymous blogger mentioned here:

Last month, GOP party chairman Ron Carey said, “Why do Hollywood celebrities think there is one set of rules for them and one set of rules for everyone else when it comes to paying taxes?”

A left-leaning blogger tried to ask Carey about the party’s FEC reports at a news conference the GOP called last week to highlight Franken’s problems. Carey dismissed him, saying the press briefing “is something for our credentialed media here.”

If it had been a certain right-leaning blogger, of course, Carey wouldn't have called on him either, but that's because the blogger would have already received and leaked the substance of the GOP story prior to the press conference. And the Strib would've had no problem identifying said blogger, even without seeing his Real ID media credential.

Here, we're taking no position on the state party's filing troubles, having already gone on record as defending the right of Democrats to make paperwork mistakes. However, let's note this isn't the only level at which the Party of Business has had accounting troubles. And the left-leaning blogger isn't the only one getting stiffed by Carey on this story.

Carey did not respond this week to Star Tribune requests for an interview about the FEC filings.

Minnesota Worst at Protecting Patients from Bad Doctors?

The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog contained one of those factoids that's bound to get sent around, devoid of context and attributed to the Journal — as it was today by Politics in Minnesota's Morning Report.

Where doctors are most (and least) likely to get busted, WSJ Health Blog. MN at the bottom of the list.

But what does Minnesota being at the "bottom of the list" mean? That our state medical board is terrible at disciplining physicians and therefore not protecting public health? The Health Blog at least takes a stab at evenhandedness.

It’s hard to know what to make of the rankings. Sid Wolfe, who runs Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, argues that state boards that are better funded, better staffed and more effective tend to have more disciplinary actions. But an official at the FSMB tells American Medical News that “it could very well be that the best medical boards succeed in preventing serious problems and would have low numbers of disciplinary actions, and the citizens of those states would be better protected.”

That doesn't stop Public Citizen from including Minnesota on its Worst States list.

I'm inclined to go with the theory that fewer disciplinary actions reflects Minnesota's generally high level of health care outcomes in the state and the relatively low proportion of paid malpractice claims. (We rank 25th for total number of paid claims, and the states that rank better have smaller or similar populations. Other "worst" states like South Dakota, Wisconsin and Mississippi also had low claims.) I'd guess the state's fairly high penetration of managed care organizations also has something to do with enforcing standards and upholding quality of physician performance.

Finally, since a small percentage of doctors commit most of the negligence, medical errors and other infractions that prompt medical board action, disciplining a higher proportion of physicians could simply be evidence of a higher proportion of substandard practitioners in the state.

In other words, Edina may have fewer arrests per capita than Minneapolis, but that's not because its police do a worse job.

Saving Tape.

The Bush White House was more committed to recycling than I thought. And, no, I don't just mean bringing back Cheney and Rumsfeld or resurrecting supply side economic policy.

It so happens the administration recycled email backup tapes used to archive White House emails during the critical spring of 2003.

Presidents are responsible for preserving all historical records during their time in office under the Presidential Records Act. Congress is conducting an investigation into possible violations of this act, including the destruction of at least ten million White House email records.

In response to a judge's orders, the White House Office of Administration (OA), which manages the networks and email systems in the White House, filed a statement, which revealed that no emails were saved between March 1 2003 and May 22, 2003. "Office of Administration is preserving 438 disaster recovery backup tapes that were written to between March 1, 2003 and September 30, 2003. Of those 438 tapes, the earliest date on which data was written ... is May 23, 2003," according to the Bush administration filing.

This time period is perhaps the most historically significant of the entire Bush administration. It includes the run up to the invasion of Iraq, diplomatic jockeying to try and rally United Nations support for war, the possible planning for retaliation against former diplomat Joe Wilson, who was accusing the administration of lying about Iraq weapons of mass destruction claims, the use of harsh interrogations in the so-called "War on Terror", as well as the formation of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) – the ruling body in Iraq after the invasion – and the controversial policy decisions the CPA undertook.

Pawlenty and the Health Care Honey Pot.

No one has covered Gov. Pawlenty's budget maneuvers and manipulations of the Health Care Access Fund better than Britt Robson. For an early example, see part III of this story, updated here, and most recently here.

Of course the reason both the governor and the Legislature proposed ambitious task forces in the first place — and the reason both task forces swallowed hard and came up with huge, radical reforms — is that health care costs are a cyclone destined to lay waste to government finances. Health care is projected to cost the state $50 billion by 2013 — or about $15 billion more than is currently spent on the entire general fund. Meanwhile, employers have seen the storm blowing in and are bailing out.

Employers bailing out of providing health insurance and Pawlenty bailing out the General Fund with proceeds from the medical provider tax as the storm approaches.  This is not an issue  we can solve through back door budget games.

Real Truth Can Only be Learned by Reading This.

A letter in the Strib today contains a fine example of that old trick — slipping into the argument an unsupported fact that everybody knows.

This bill moves Minnesota in exactly the wrong direction. We need only look to Canada to see how "big government" health care is failing miserably. Real health care reform can only be achieved by reducing, not increasing, government involvement.

How exactly Canadian health care is failing remains unspecified, presumably because we've all heard by now how restricted access and long wait times plague the Canadian system. It's true, wait times on average in Canada may be longer; the real issue is whether the wait is detrimental to the health of the patients.

Of course Jeff Davis of Minnesota Majority only wants us to look to Canada in a metaphorical sense. Otherwise, we might find data like this from Healthcare Economist:

If this is "failing miserably," I wonder exactly how Davis would rescue Canadians from their longer life expectancy and lower overall spending. (The referenced study concludes the two systems produce roughly equivalent results.)

Today's lesson is to look for yourself when anyone prescribing a solution to a complex social issue says, "Real _________ can only be achieved by _________."

Eyesore or Inspiration?

I never got around to posting this folly from Colorado that expresses something profound about the west, at least for me.

I love its vernacular meshing of a rail car, recycled bridge section, pioneer cart wheels, storage buildings behind, log cabin carpentry, passive solar heating, observatory and "fuck you if you don't like it" attitude. You could almost install it in the Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden, except it would lose something in that setting.

And since the residents built this place out in ranch country, they probably wouldn't take kindly to the Minneapolis traffic.

Such freedom of expression needs big spaces, of course. I'd probably have less affection for this or some other  farmyard junkyards I have shown here if they sat 15 feet off my lot line. But much of my acceptance would have to do with whether I knew the owner, and how. I don't believe most things that annoy me were created for that purpose, and so I approach annoyance as an opportunity to learn, preferably, two-way.

It's easy to advocate for freedom of thought and words you don't agree with, to wear flag lapel pins and support the troops from the next county who thought the Army was some kind of patriotic prep school for poor kids. For most of us, coexisting with China is an abstraction.

The best test of values and of tolerance usually occurs right in your own back yard.

Bush Facing Trial, But First...

WHAT IS YOUR GOAL AS A PLAYWRIGHT?
I didn’t realize playwrights were required to have goals. It may be that I’m a playwright because I have no goal.

WHAT DO YOU KNOW NOW THAT YOU WISH YOU KNEW WHEN YOU BEGAN PLAYWRITING?
That kissing ass is a life-skill.
— Lee Blessing, quoted in The Playwright' Center's Dialogue

The title of Lee Blessing's latest play, "When We Go Upon the Sea," sounded so familiar that I went searching for its literary reference. A Quaker hymn? Something from Yeats's "The Shadowy Waters"? A line from Edward Lear?

But all Google returned on that search string of six simple but resonant words were a few pages announcing its upcoming staged reading at the Guthrie Theater, Monday May 19th, and this description:

A man named George Bush arrives one evening in The Hague, Netherlands, where he faces the difficult task of going on trial the next day. Before that, however, he has an equally difficult job: getting through the night.

Not a literal depiction of the historical President Bush — or even a projection of his future — the play deals with the decisions he's made and why he made them.

Don't mistake a staged reading for a very watered-down live production. With professional actors, no sets and minimal stage business, a reading focuses your attention on the writing — its beauty and its meaning. Think a story being told through a poetry reading for multiple voices.

I'd be there even if I weren't affiliated with The Playwrights' Center, which is working with Blessing to develop the script.

Mock Ads: Is that a New Pandering Suit?

A reminder of the Worst Political Ads in America Awards, coming up May 21st.

Last night, the Daily Show aired the first in a John Oliver series on the Pollies. When I swore Stephen Colbert had hired an actor to play a dumb Congressman for a "Know Your District" segment, I was wrong*, so I'm not going to suggest the political consultants he interviewed are not the real ad creators. But somebody, please tell me these supposedly sophisticated image shapers are engaging in a little self-parody. Please?

And in honor of the primaries today...

_____ * Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) was shown during a "Know Your District" segment being able to recall only three of the Ten Commandments and admitting he couldn't remember them all. It turns out he did come up with seven in the full interview.

Narcissism and the Commons.

Last week, Shankar Vedantam wrote a Washington Post column titled, "Clinton, Obama and the Narcissist's Tale." It appeared yesterday under a different Star Tribune headline, "Democrats face a classic 'tragedy of the commons.'" One emphasizes the self-absorption required of politicians; the other highlights its effects.

I'm more interested the commons metaphor and how it relates beyond the current presidential race because I think it helps define the great dividing line of our time. Parties and candidates have clustered at the poles of the real divisions among us — whether to value the big picture over the short run and place collective interest on at least a par with self-interest.

Vedantam invokes the tragedy of the commons to explain the dangerous trap of this "fault line" between individual and collective interest:

Individuals embroiled in similar dilemmas find them impossible to solve on their own, because they are confronted by a Hobson's Choice: Act selfishly and cause collective disaster, or act altruistically and aid someone else who is acting selfishly. Either way, selfishness wins.

"The way the system is set up, the more-selfish person has a higher probability of winning," social psychologist W. Keith Campbell said of the Democratic primary. "You end up with the more narcissistic, belligerent candidate."

He cites an experiment by Campbell in which volunteers were tasked as timber companies to manage a forest in perpetuity.

[Since] the volunteers did not know whether their kindness would be reciprocated by others or exploited by competitors, people raced to cut as much timber as they could and quickly razed the forests to the ground. Groups with volunteers more willing to think about the collective good preserved their forests longer. But selfish people within these groups had a field day exploiting the altruists — and the forests perished anyway.

Much of the conflict in the public domain mirrors this dynamic. Free market vs. government regulation. Energy development vs. conservation. The individual or family vs. the collective. The castle vs. the commons.

Government and other social institutions, especially religion, have developed to regulate or redirect behavior from the destructive effects of selfishness. But Reaganism has led an all-out assault on the notion of "the commons," associating it with failed socialist states instead of with managing, in Jedediah Purdy's* phrase,  "the things that we cannot avoid having in common and whose maintenance or neglect implicates us all." That is, the legal system, the economy, public health and the natural world to name a few.

The attack on the commons has been prosecuted against and through those very institutions charged with keeping it — school boards, churches, local governments and federal agencies — abetted by think tanks, pundits and pollsters who retail to the public simpleminded formulations of complex problems and then pretend to discover them as the will of the people.

Public opinion, Purdy says, "has become shorthand for uninformed attitudes dignified by statistical aggregation." And the "Public,"  he says, is increasingly defined in Libertarian terms to be whatever government provides to people who are too lazy or weak to get a share of the "Private."

Although unregulated behavior can be modeled and the consequences predicted, before they will act, cultures of heightened self-interest demand proof, which practically means collapse of fisheries or financial systems. In Garrett Hardin's term, "intrinsic responsibility" can be clearly grasped when an act is straightforward and the consequences are immediate. But those who most loudly espouse personal responsibility and accountability for actions rarely see their own complicity in causing harm when the effects are indirect — through consumption, financial manipulation, disinvestment or discrimination.

We cannot and should not legislate away self-interest, but neither can we blithely continue to grow population, consume energy and amass wealth as if we were the planet's sole occupants — or, alternatively, as if we all have our own personal savior waiting in the wings.

Until we learn to see the systems we live within, we contribute to their ruin. And even then...

_______

* I could've sworn I'd written before about Jedediah Purdy's book, For Common Things, but apparently not. (Naturally, libertarians didn't like it; nor did  Caleb Crain. But here's another view that there are worse sins than being privileged, earnest and young.)

Why Brodkorb is Better Than You Think.

Bruce Benidt is talking about Hillary vs. Obama, but the point applies.

So Much to Learn, So Little Time.

It's just your basic Costco bottle of French table wine, but M.Chapoutier  made the effort. Turns out, someone else noticed this vinter a few months ago.

My braille, she is not so good, but it appears on this bottle, "Rhone" was rendered "Rhthne," though maybe the same dots also stand for Ô.

Or maybe I'm starting to see things...

St. Thomas Law: Serving a Growth Industry.

When the University of St. Thomas started its law school a few years ago, it set out to distinguish itself by integrating faith and the law. But is this the way to build your reputation as a law school?

St. Thomas has denied a law student academic credit for an internship with Planned Parenthood. In so doing, it joins ranks with other Catholic law schools and Pat Robertson's prestigious Regent University. Not to mention institutions of sharia law.

The young woman enrolled at St. Thomas with a different view of the school's mission.

"I thought Catholic doctrine would be reflected in the faculty and the curriculum, and it would be a safe place to talk about those issues, but not enforce them."

The church opposes birth control and abortion, so it holds a dim view of offering volunteer service at the agency. Presumably, it still opposes murder, rape, robbery and bearing false witness, all matters that involve the legal profession. If the church is truly worried about students having their faith somehow compromised or contaminated by exposure to the legal activities  of Planned Parenthood, perhaps it should come up with ways to insulate them from being around actual criminals, too.

Or it could do what these other law schools seem designed for — funneling more tunnel-vision Christians into the service of subverting government and working around existing laws. After all, that's where the job growth has been lately.

Wasted Energy, For Sure.

Twin City Sidewalks links to a year-old post at the satiric Journal of American Rocket Science. It concerns a letter from an Arkansas woman who believes daylight saving time was moved earlier as part of a liberal plot to convince the gullible that global warming is real.

That letter was written tongue-in-cheek, as was one claiming DST would ruin Aspen's skiing. I'm not sure about the reader complaint I recently heard from a former Colorado newspaper publisher  that the "extra hour of daylight" in the spring would cause problems with the crops. 

Daylight saving time has also been tagged with increased auto fatalities (due to more accidents resulting from lost sleep), killing the drive-in movie and increased energy usage due to shifts in heating and cooling. The Wall Street Journal loved the last one, but there were issues with the study, including the fact the researchers looked only at residential electrical use. (About 74% of single family homes use natural gas or other petroleum-based fuel for space and water heating, which accounts for nearly 65% of home energy use.)

Arguments for DST include reduced auto fatalities (since most accidents occur in evening hours), extra Halloween candy sales and more sales of outdoor barbecuing supplies and golf equipment.

All I'm sure of is that I wasted a couple hours of beautiful Sunday daylight researching this.

The Good Thing About Meth.

Two suspects were arrested outside a storage unit where cash, sales records and a supply of methamphetamine were found. See if you can figure out what's wrong with this story:

Officers contacted Corley walking near the storage unit, and he admitted there was meth and cash inside the unit and that he planned to jump the fence into the business to retrieve them, the affidavit said. He later admitted he owned the meth and cash. He said the money came from selling meth, and he planned to use the money to buy more meth, the affidavit said.

Willis, who was found driving near the storage unit, told officers there was meth inside the storage unit and that she helped take it there, the affidavit said. Paperwork inside the unit indicated the unit belonged to Willis, the affidavit said.

Notice the suspects immediately confessed, even though they hadn't been caught doing much of anything. They must also have been users. My brother the cop says that's one positive aspect of dealing with meth addicts. They don't lie or even dissemble. In fact, they'll often volunteer information about their past crimes.

Parting Shot.

This shot of the table in the Palisade Brewery men's room nearly says it all about this country.