Dead children, dead dog, dead hot tub...

The father of the 5 children whose mother killed them explains: "She wasn't in the right frame of mind." That cleared it up for me, so I didn't bother to read the actual story.

The guy who threw the dog into traffic in a road rage incident (very big news in the Bay Area for a while), is sentenced to 3 years in prison, which the Daily Show explained is actually 21 anal-rape years.

A Washington Post story explains that the California fake energy crisis is damaging the hot tub business. I foresee a mass exodus from Marin County. Something like the Okies, but with hot tubs strapped to the SUVs as they seek a better life.

Bush sent a messenger to Congress to threaten to veto the Patients' Bill of Rights, as they were discussing it. I mean a formal messenger, not quite up to Black Rod's standards, but some sort of formal thing I don't recall having seen before. I watched a bit of the debate on C-SPAN, or actually I watched Phil Gramm for two minutes, after which I felt like I needed health care. He was explaining how forcing health plans to cover Emergency Room visits made ERs unwilling to negotiate prices with insurance companies because under this provision they could charge whatever they wanted, so really we should be restricting people's ability to go to emergency rooms. That sort of logic is the best argument there is for a single-payer health plan. There is an article by Michael Kinsley on this in Slate that's worth reading.

So a 62-year old woman had implanted an embryo from her brother, crippled by 1992 since he tried to blow his brains out. It's not incest, she insists, because the egg, obviously, isn't hers. The offspring would ensure inheritance worth $3 million. On today's Jerry Springer: high tech hillbillies. Worse, they're French.