Peoria Pundit

Before doctors Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin developed the vaccines that have no doubt prevented millions and millions of people from getting polio, there was Dr. Thomas H. Weller. He and two other researchers shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in medicine for the breakthrough that led to the polio vaccine.

He died Saturday at age 93.

Kudos.

From Galesburg.com:

Maurice Fox’s motorized wheelchair became lodged when his wheels were trapped between the tracks while on his way to Aldi grocery store as a train approached.

“The problem was as soon as the three of us started working on it, we could hear a train horn,” said Galesburg Fire Department Capt. Dan Foley.

A frightened Fox said he didn’t know what to do when he became stuck.

“It was a bad situation, knowing that my daughter just got hit by a train not too long ago,” Fox said. “All those things went through my mind.”

His daughter, Marci McClendon, was killed by a train Dec. 30, 2006, when she was struck by a train in East Galesburg.

All joking aside, this is a huge issue, I imagine, for those confined to a wheelchair. Isn’t it the railroad’s responsibility to make sure that people using wheelchairs can use crossings?

I’m sure rail enthusiasts will have something to day.

Via the Associated Press:

The Supreme Court says Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

The court’s 5-4 ruling strikes down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision goes further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.

The court had not conclusively interpreted the Second Amendment since its ratification in 1791. The amendment reads: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The basic issue for the justices was whether the amendment protects an individual’s right to own guns no matter what, or whether that right is somehow tied to service in a state militia.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for four colleagues, said the Constitution does not permit “the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.”

My two cents: Wonderful news. Let’s hope that someone goes after Illinois gun laws. It would seem that the right to bear arms means just that — the right to bear ams. I would think this would ban laws prohibing the concealed carry of weapons by otherwise law-abiding individuals.

UPDATE: I’m eagerly awaiting a Rob’s Rant on Angie’s Drama.

UPDATE 2: Here is part of CNN’s take on the decision:

In March, two women went before the justices with starkly different opinions on the handgun ban.

Shelly Parker told the court she is a single woman who has been threatened by drug dealers in her Washington neighborhood.

“In the event that someone does get in my home, I would have no defense, except maybe throw my paper towels at them,” she said, explaining she told police she had an alarm, bars on her windows and a dog.

“What more am I supposed to do?” Parker recalled asking authorities. “The police turned to me and said, ‘Get a gun.’ “

Elilta “Lily” Habtu, however, told the high court that she supports the handgun ban, and tighter gun control in general. Habtu was in a Virginia Tech classroom in April 2007 when fellow student Seung-Hui Cho burst in and began shooting. She survived bullets to the head and arm.

“There has to be tighter gun control; we can’t let another Virginia Tech to happen,” she told the court. “And we’re just not doing it; we’re sitting around; we’re doing nothing. We let the opportunity arise for more massacres.”

Nothing in this article, however, that mentions how many existing gun laws, were violated at Virginia Tech, not the least of which would be the many laws prohibing people from shooting people without reason.

And there is this paragraph:

Only Chicago, Illinois, has a handgun ban as sweeping as Washington’s, though Maryland, Massachusetts and San Francisco, California, joined the Windy City in issuing briefs supporting the district’s ban.

Yep. Bad news for the People’s Republic of Chicago. The proletariat is getting the right to shoot back.

Glenn Beck can be a real doofus at times, but he is right on the money on the issue of illegal immigration:

The unspoken truth is that these businesses don’t hire illegal aliens because they can’t find American workers, they hire illegal aliens because they don’t want American workers. And it has nothing to do with wages.

Illegal aliens mean no workers’ comp claims, no age, race or sex discrimination lawsuits, no healthcare premiums, no unions, and no demands for raises, vacations or bigger offices. In fact, illegal immigrants are the perfect employees because they’re not employees at all; they’re corporate slaves.

Economist Dr. Thomas Sowell once said, “Blacks were not enslaved because they were black, but because they were available.” Can’t the exact same thing be said for illegal aliens? They’re available and we’re allowing them to be exploited in the name of cheap groceries.

Is the price of fruit really the standard we want to live up to as a country? Is that really who we’ve become?

I’m all for legal immigration. And I’m all in favor of increasing the amount of legal immigration, and making it easier.

But what we’ve allowed to happen here is an environment where good jobs are beign sent elsewhere by companies like our very own Caterpillar Inc., while low-paying jobs that can’t be exported are being taken over by the 21st century’s version of slave labor.

This cannot continue.

Here’s some statistical evidence that nanny-state thinking backfires, via a study done at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee:

By comparing data from a variety of locations around the United States where laws requiring smoke-free bars exist with locations without bans, economists Scott Adams and Chad Cotti found a relative increase in fatalities caused by drunk driving following ban enactment.

…

While the results at first seemed surprising to Adams, a UWM assistant professor of economics, and Cotti, now at the University of South Carolina, literature on consumer behavior suggests an explanation: Smokers are willing to drive longer distances to an establishment that allows smoking.

“Like they would to buy fireworks, lotto tickets or, in some cases, alcohol, people will often go to a neighboring jurisdiction that doesn’t have a ban,” says Adams. The number of smokers willing to drive extra distances offsets any reduction in driving from smokers choosing to stay home following a ban, he adds.

My two cents: The obvious solution: Ban bars. In fact, we ought to ban driving. Make people walk everywhere. Wearing padding. And mandatory home inspections are needed to make sure they aren’t smoking there, either. And let’s ban bacon too.

From a book written by an environmentalist:

Is fighting pollution good? Yep. Is using less fossile fuel good? Yep. Is acting like the Earth will be destroyed if we don’t start living like we did before we starting using fire because we’ve fallen for a scam based on pseudo-science a good idea? Nope.

Also:

Is Wingham a flake, a denier in league with flat-earthers? Only if you think the chair of the department of space and climate physics and head of earth sciences at University College London, and a member of the Earth Observation Experts Group, among other qualifications, qualifies for such a label.

The most intriguing part of The Deniers is the attempt by dozens of credible scientists to point out what should be common-sense obvious: The sun might affect Earth’s climate.

“We understand the greenhouse effect pretty well,” Solomon writes, “we know little about how the sun — our main source of energy driving the climate — affects climate change.”

But the IPCC refuses to even consider the sun’s influence on Earth’s climate — it conceives of its mission only to investigate possible man-made effects upon climate. But that’s akin to a hit-and-run investigation where police rule out all cars except one model before they even question witnesses.