Earlier in the summer the fights were taking place at Bluegrass Park and he locked the park to prevent the problem. The group then moved to the city park to engage in fights.

“At 2:30 p.m. when the kids get off the school bus is when they are gathering,” Gainer said. “We need the city attorney to look into this.”

Gainer said with cooler weather setting in, the group’s numbers seem to have dwindled.

“We need to be proactive this winter to prevent the problem next spring and summer,” Gainer said. “One time there was a fight with two girls and there was blood everywhere.”

Perhaps you are wondering why the insurance companies are doing this. Well, the AP says that this development is “an unintended consequence of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law, state officials said Friday.”

Okay, how so?

The next paragraph brings this “explanation”:

“Starting later this year, the health care overhaul law requires insurers to accept children regardless of medical problems. Insurers are worried that parents will wait until kids get sick to sign them up, saddling the companies with unpredictable costs.”

Okay, so that’s a pretty good explanation of why—like the insurance companies are saying and some insurance commissioners are agreeing—we probably need some sort of enrollment period for the “guaranteed issue” policies for children, so that parents can’t put off buying these policies until they are “on the way to the hospital,” as one insurance company executive worries that they will do.

And it helps make the point why, contrary to what some critics of the reform bill want to do, we can’t in general just tell insurance companies not to pay attention to preexisting conditions without forcing everyone to buy coverage. Again, people could just wait to enroll until they get sick, adding only costs and no revenue to the picture from the insurance companies’ point of view, which, you know, really would be anti-business and un-American and whatever other negative things the health-insurance-reform bill is alleged by critics to be.

But it’s not an explanation of why companies would stop issuing policies to children now, while they can still pick and choose which children to cover on the basis of preexisting conditions, general health, etc.

Perhaps the article is trying to make the point that there are two problems: (1) the insurance companies are stopping issuing policies now, and (2) they aren’t planning to start again once the new rules that will require guaranteed issue take effect in September.

Perhaps. And that really could be a problem, one for which the fairest solution would probably be to institute the aforementioned enrollment periods.

But the article only ever gets around to talking about problem 1, and never gets around to explaining problem 2, so I’m just guessing.

It’s disheartening that so few Americans can be bothered to follow important news (as opposed to news about, say, the New Black Panthers).

But when you read articles that make as little sense as this one, it’s hard to blame people for tuning out of coverage about the important stuff.

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“No more New York.”

There’s not much context in the article, so it’s possible she was only bemoaning the inconvenience she experienced (she “was stuck waiting in a deli until 2 a.m. because part of a Marriott hotel was evacuated because of the bomb”). As we’ve learned from, say, polls finding that huge swaths of Republicans aren’t sure whether Obama was born in the U.S. or not, sometimes people make dramatic, exaggerated statements when they feel out of control in a situation and want to express their displeasure. Maybe she was being interviewed at 2 a.m. in said deli. I know I’d be displeased, in her shoes.

But if she was really saying that she is never willing to visit NYC again, just because some mental midgets tried to detonate an amateurishly constructed car bomb—well, I’m just shocked. I thought Americans were made of sterner stuff. I know Texans like to think they are. Does Ms. Salinas realize that hers is exactly the reaction sought by whoever did this? And that she’s giving it to them in response to what amounts to a head fake?

Fortunately, not everyone is looking for a bed to hide under.

“This is America. This is what we do,” said Earl Morriss of Seattle, who was sightseeing. “Nobody is going to stop us from living our lives and doing what we want to do.”

That’s a little more like it.

One county resident, who also happens to work for the federal government, recently wrote to the Missoulian: “Do I need a daily letter from the sheriff to enter my home and talk to my wife, or will there be provision for some sort of blanket authorization?”

Now, another Ravalli County resident wants to change the Montana constitution.

“Cathy Hackett of Stevensville this week launched a proposed constitutional initiative campaign to put the boundaries from Montana’s original 1889 constitution into the state’s 1972 constitution. These boundaries spell out, in latitudes and longitudes, where Montana is situated.

“I really think that places our state sovereignty in jeopardy if we don’t have official boundaries in our constitution,” Hackett said Tuesday.”

Hackett, who describes herself as “a bit of a rebel,” is worried that—without the state’s boundaries spelled out in the state constitution—”if you get charged with breaking a Montana law, you could very well use that as a defense and get off.”

I don’t know if this is correct or not, but then, neither does Hackett. Stating the obvious, the reporter advises us that Hackett “is not a lawyer.”

Then there’s this:

“Qualifying a constitutional initiative for the November 2010 ballot is no easy task. To do so requires the signatures of nearly 49,000 registered Montana voters, including 10 percent of the voters in 40 of the 100 state House districts. The signatures must be turned by June 18.

“There’s people all over the state I believe can help me,” Hackett said. “I was part of the Ron Paul thing when he was running for president. We still e-mail each other. I’m counting on those people. I’m confident that they’ll agree with me.”

In other words, Hackett finds it safe to assume that a Ron Paul supporter can be engaged in a quixotic and time-consuming effort to rectify a problem that no state legislator, legal scholar, defense attorney, or jailhouse lawyer has yet noticed and that mainly sounds problematic only if one has just recently begun learning about the subject in a relative vacuum.

I’m not saying this doesn’t sound possible, but—if I were among these Ron Paul supporters—I wouldn’t take the nature of Hackett’s faith in them as a compliment.

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“They asked us years ago if we wanted to carry guns, and I turned it down. It’d just be too tempting.”

The alleged perpetrator could be charged with “felony aggravated animal cruelty,” which I assume could result in jail time. I hope it does, if only to provide the appropriate venue for a conversation between him and some kitten-loving biker^[1] that starts like this:

“So, what are you in for?”

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1. If you follow only one hyperlink today, make it this one!

My latest column over at Went West reports on a list of demands that 175 residents of the next county over from Missoula have forwarded to their sheriff and county commissioners. Here’s my favorite:

Implement a requirement that the sheriff press county residents 18 and over into a militia, for which he will organize training three weeks out of every year. The Missoulian quotes some amplifying detail from the questionnaire: “Women must serve, but not in a combat capacity unless the men are in danger of being overrun.”

You’ll want to read the rest, especially if you’ve never heard of the “constitutional sheriff” movement.

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So, how did a little-known former nude model win Teddy Kennedy’s seat for the GOP?

Because he ran like he wanted it, and the Democrat didn’t. (I mean, no tracking polls?)

It’s that simple. And I suspect old Ted would be the first to appreciate the ironies in the situation. One begins to understand the malice lurking in the allegedly Chinese alleged curse “may you live in interesting times.”^[1]

There are some other factors. Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the economy sucks right now, and that’s never going to help a party retain power.

I also think that the excitement felt by so many Brown supporters has something to tell us about most people’s relationship to politics: with the exception of residents of just a handful of states (and while I’m no expert, I don’t think Massachusetts is one of them), most people feel as if their votes don’t matter much. So when an election comes along that feels like it can turn things upside down, or when the kind of candidate who never usually wins is suddenly within spitting distance of the victor’s crown, people get energized. (I think this was a factor in Obama’s victory, too.)

But I don’t want to make excuses. One side considered this election a must-win, and the other didn’t. As usual, the game goes to the one with more heart.

Speaking of games, I hope the blame game that seems to be consuming various factions of the left lasts about five more seconds, and that then they just get back to work. There is still an opportunity to pass health-insurance reform,^[2] and the election of a man who only opposes national health-insurance reform because Massachusetts already has its own similar system is no reason to back down now.

What the situation needs is not more bipartisanship or moderation: Obama ran on reforming health care and won—by a lot—and he has yet to see the first hand extended in true fellowship from the right side of the aisle. (He didn’t even get a single vote in favor of continuing the Bush stimulus program, mere days after being inaugurated.) After the election of 2006, widely seen as a denunciation of Bush’s Iraq war, what did Bush decide to do? Reach across the aisle? Listen to criticism? No: he “dramatically expanded the US troop commitment in Iraq.”

The GOP has said it wants to scuttle health-insurance reform in order to cripple Obama’s presidency. If he and the Democrats do not have the mettle and discipline to pass this bill, that outcome will be nothing less than what they deserve. They will have demonstrated that they are not fit to lead, and I’ll be the first to admit it.

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1. Speaking of “interesting,” the Wikipedia entry on this “curse” is worth a read. No one can prove it’s actually Chinese (of course; I suspected that would be the case before I looked it up). But I enjoyed learning about two other curses that are supposed to be related to this one. The “interesting times” curse is lowest in curse intensity, followed in ascending order by:

• May you come to the attention of those in authority (sometimes rendered May the government be aware of you).
• May you find what you are looking for.

Scary stuff!

2. The safest^[3] course of action is for the House to simply pass the Senate bill, because there is no telling how soon Brown will be sworn into the Senate, probably dooming to death-by-filibuster any effort to pass changes to the bill there. Don’t be deceived: the official rule is that the Senate doesn’t have to swear him until Massachusetts certifies him the victor. Massachusetts doesn’t do that until all the votes are in, and in Massachusetts absentee and military ballots aren’t due on election day. But even if this process takes weeks and weeks, do you really want to give Democrats at least two additional opportunities (one vote in the House, to approve changes to the Senate bill, and then one vote in the Senate—which will take at least five days, because of the inevitability of a filibuster) to prove how disorganized and feckless they can be?

Ironically, though, there is a precedent for swearing him in right away: an exception to the certification requirement was made for Teddy Kennedy himself back in 1962. Woops! The world really is wild at heart and weird on top!

3. Depends what you mean by “safest,” of course. My usage encompasses all of those congressmembers representatives who are aware that they are in Washington to do the people’s business, and that the people really, really need this bill. On the other hand, it seems possible that many vulnerable House members will see Brown’s victory as reason to retract their support for the bill, lest their own seats not remain “safe.” Obama once said he was willing to be a one-term president if that’s what it took to pass health-insurance reform. Here’s hoping that enough potentially wayward House members will follow this example.

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Conan could still pull this out.