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Is Your Property Too Attractive?

This is truly frightening. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today (link defunct) that a city can seize private property for private economic development.

From the article:

Local officials, not federal judges, know best in deciding whether a development project will benefit the community, justices said.

Wow. Five justices really believe that? That, in effect, says not “They can take the land in this narrow instance,” but “We don’t want to touch this issue. Don’t bother us again.” That truly surprises me. I’ve been hearing about cases like this for a couple of years now. I always assumed that if a case was heard by the Supreme Court, they would side with the property owners. I guess I was wrong.

Side note… I admit that I have not studied the rulings of the 9 justices in detail, but I have the distinct impression that I’m siding with the ones that I would normally disagree with on this one. O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas shared the dissenting opinion.

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Critter Invasion (again)

Ah, the joys of home ownership. Late this morning (early this afternoon?), Amy and I were lounging on the couch, and she kept finding ants on her. When I took a closer look, the little critters had started a full scale invasion of the living room. A large portion of the rest of the day has been dedicated to trying to take care of them. I think I found the right mound and got them, but (as always) it will take a day or two to know for sure.

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Guilty Pleasure

Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl video has become a new guilty pleasure for me, I think. The lyrics are truly inane, but I can’t help but watch. 🙂 The funny thing is that I don’t normally find her all that attractive. Actually, I think it’s all the high school band imagery and sound that do it for me. I could be wrong, but it looks like they wrangled members from a real band (or bands) to help with the video. It’s a very Tusk-esque song in that way (yes, I know Fleetwood Mac didn’t use a high school band… just go with it).

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Robot Chicken Meets Voltron Meets Jeff

It’s either really cool or really lame that I recognized the Voltron toy used in one of the episodes of Robot Chicken (the sketch where Voltron “got served”). It’s the exact one I had as a kid (and still have in one of my keepsake boxes). I used to LOVE that show.
EDIT YET AGAIN:
And Cartoon Network and the YouTube posters play cat and mouse. The video works (for now), but unfortunately no lyrics any more.
Have fun!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcV0bK1UwCg

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Musical Baton

As prompted by Amy’s post, here are my answers (below the break).