Louisiana State Sen. Danny Martiny, R-Kenner, has filed Senate Bill 115 on behalf of the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops. There, I got an entire sentence out before rediculing this rediculous bill. Bill 115 was crafted for the specific purpose of banning scientists in Louisiana from creating human-animal hybrids. Yes, you read that right–human-animal hybrids. Now, the lobbyist for the Conference of Catholic Bishops, Danny Loar, admits that this has not happened yet in Louisiana, in fact it has not even been discussed yet, but he wants this bill to be a “pre-emptive strike”.

Anyone who is convicted of doing so could face up to 10 years in prison, could be fined up to $10,000 or both. Anyone who profits financially by such experimentation, the bill says, would face a civil fine of $1 million or twice the amount of the gross gain realized — whichever is more.

Thank goodness Senator Danny Martiny (speaking of Martiny, he sounds like he should have a martini) has introduced this bill, otherwise we might have centaurs, minotaurs, and mermaids roving all over the state.

The drinking age here in the United States is considered an open-and-shut case. Very few people ever question the wisdom of having the drinking age be twenty-one. Little is known about how that age limit came to be, or how it compares nationally. Thankfully, FlowData has helped to remedy this situation. The picture in the article depicts the drinking ages all around the world, in each seperate countries. The United States’ drinking age is matched in harshness by India and Indonesia, the highest drinking age in the world. The only more harsh status is the total ban of alchohol in a number of Middle Eastern and Northeastern African countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. There are some countries, like Greenland, Kazakistan, and Madagascar, where this is no drinking age at all.

I’m not going to make any snide or cynical comments about this in a pledge to civil liberties and lowering the drinking age. Read the data and interpret for yourself. I’ll only let this be known: Drinking levels are much higher in Indonesia and America than in Madagascar and Greenland.

Janitor Jesus Barajas worked his butt off for more than thirty years in an effort to save up enough money to build his dream house on the property he owns in Seattle. But now his plans are going to have to be scaled down because of a local city ordinance that claims he also has to pay for a sidewalk to be put in, despite the fact that there will likely not be any other sidewalk (aside from on his property) for many years, so it will be a piece of concrete that stretches across the front of his property, but ends on either side. The estimated cost of this involuntary sidewal-to-nowhere? $15,000.

-The Political Avenger

As a bonafide political junkie, I spend a lot of time surfing other political website, blogs, and news sites. This leads me to a lot of very strange, good, racist, and fringe articles–but sometimes its the perfectly mainstream articles that catch my attention in the strangest ways. Exhibit A–this article on the rising cigarette tax.

The entire article is fairly innocuous, but there is one particular quote that evoked my interest. Paul Stein, age 23, a smoker from Galliano, Louisiana, said “It’s made me think to smoke less. With cigarette prices going up it almost doesn’t pay to smoke.”

It doesn’t pay to smoke because of the tax more doubled? What about the lung cancer, the fact that it’s a disgusting habit, or the revolting knowledge that it contains urea–the same chemical compound that makes urine smell the way it does? These are the things that make smoking untenable, not a $1.01 tax on each pack.

-The Political Avenger