Well Duh Weekend News

This weekend we report on the news that any idiot would have known before picking up the paper he can't even read. Welcome to D'uh Weekend News.

Tsunami Hits Poor The Hardest

Last year's Asian tsunami hit poor people far harder than the middle class and wealthy, and the aid effort could worsen the income gap between the rich and the poor in affected regions, a major aid group warned Saturday.

Wait. The news keeps coming:

"Desperately poor people have been made poorer still by the tsunami," said Oxfam's Britain director, Barbara Stocking. Poor people's wooden homes were more likely to be ruined than wealthier victims' brick and stone ones, the agency said. Many poor homeowners have been unable to get compensation for destroyed abodes because they had no deeds. And those who rented informally were often left with nowhere to live, Oxfam said.

Supreme Court Case May Lead To Abuse

No kidding.

The 5-4 decision, while rooted in high-court precedents over the past 50 years, leaves a door wide open for exploitation if craven or overzealous local officials are not restrained. States and localities clearly have leeway to seize private land, not just for a public purpose, such as a road or park, but also to hand to private developers. It's a power that invites abuse.

Some real life examples from the article.

• A city in Washington state removed a woman in her 80s from her home of 55 years supposedly to expand a sewer plant, then sold the land to an auto dealership.
• A New Jersey development agency tried to seize an elderly woman's home and two businesses to provide more parking for one of Donald Trump's casino hotels; the state Supreme Court stopped it.
• A city in Kansas took a used-car lot and turned it over to the new-car dealer next door, who had failed in his efforts to buy the site from the previous owner.

City Taking on Panhandlers Becomes Racial. Really? That is so unusual.

Hoping to boost convention business and tidy up downtown, the City Council is considering a measure to prevent visitors from being hit up for money by homeless people around Olympic Centennial park, CNN Center and some of the South's finest restaurants.

I wonder if most of Atlanta's homeless are black?

But most of the panhandlers are black. And earlier this week, the council sent the proposal back to committee after activists likened the ban to the "Negro removal" policy that they say white downtown business elites pursued in the 1950s.

I wonder if the race warlords will compare this to Jim Crowe laws?

"This is a mean-spirited continuation of what they call the `sanitation' of Peachtree Street," said Joe Beasley, a 68-year-old Atlanta native who heads the regional office of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. "The white folks, their position was that black people were bad for commerce, and if you were black, you just didn't go on Peachtree Street unless you were cleaning up or something."

Well, then. The bill's sponsor must be a white man.

But in the self-proclaimed "City Too Busy to Hate," the panhandling ban's sponsor — who is himself black — said it has nothing to do with race and everything to do with business. "Our No. 1 industry in Atlanta is tourism and conventions. If we don't do something, we run the risk of our downtown becoming a ghost town after dark," said Councilman H. Lamar Willis.

A ghost town, huh? Yup. Ghosts are white. Just another effort to turn the city white!

Senate Dems Want To Be Treated Like They Are In Power

WASHINGTON - Senate Democrats are urging President Bush to consult with them on a possible Supreme Court nomination to help avoid the kind of controversy that engulfed his lower court picks.

Imagine that. I thought they would accept their role as the party beaten at the polls like dogs. Apparently not. Who knows. Maybe they will refuse to let the full Senate even vote on a nominee.

Marijuana Activists Nervous After Raid. Maybe they should smoke a little more. I hear that calms you down.

High STD Rates Are A Problem. Especially, it seems, for young drug users.

Young drug users have high rates of the sexually transmitted diseases herpes simplex virus 2 and syphilis, according to a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and other institutions.

I am shocked. What's next? Higher DUI rates among alcoholics?

A Sex Summit. Where? San Francisco.

Next week, we investigate a rumor that the poor might not have as much stuff as the rich.