Pun Salad

On page A3 of today's dead-trees Foster's Daily Democrat:

Man accused of not selling marijuana

If you're not a Foster's subscriber, you'll have to take my word for it. The online version, regrettably, rewrote the headline:

Portsmouth police say man kept money meant for drug buy, violating parole in process

• One last URL relevant to President Obama's visit to Portsmouth on Tuesday: a long post from Amy Kane, full of links and thoughtfulness.

• It's (very) easy and (sort of) fun to ridicule and insult Obamacare, but the natural rejoinder is: what would you do instead?

  Doing nothing is always an option. Despite scare tactics, we can muddle though without a massive increase in taxes, regulations, and subsidies. "Nothing" really is better than that.

  But we can do better: John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, had an excellent op-ed in the WSJ yesterday that outlines seven major steps that would help a lot toward getting overall health care costs down, help uninsured people get the care they need, and most importantly, make personal responsibility an underlying goal:

  Health-care reform is very important. Whatever reforms are enacted it is essential that they be financially responsible, and that we have the freedom to choose doctors and the health-care services that best suit our own unique set of lifestyle choices. We are all responsible for our own lives and our own health. We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom to make wise lifestyle choices that will protect our health. Doing so will enrich our lives and will help create a vibrant and sustainable American society.

  I like that.

• The Club For Growth has issued the 2009 version of its "House RePORK Card", ranking Congresscritters on the percentage of anti-Pork votes. Mine, Carol Shea-Porter, got an outstanding 0%; out of 68 amendments she could have voted for, she chose to vote for … none of them.

  In her defense, she was in a 211-way tie for last place, with 201 of her fellow Democrats and 9 Republicans. So (unfortunately) she's not atypical.

The Perl script that semi-randomly picks the next book from my to-be-read database seems to be alternating between Sherlock Holmes's Victorian London and Harry Bosch's modern LA. Whatever. They're both nasty places in which only a gifted detective can bring a determined evildoer to justice.

This is the eighth book in Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series. And as usual, Harry's in for quite a bit of psychic punishment. A dog rambling in the Hollywood hills has returned to his master with a bone clutched in its mouth. And worse, it's human. Harry eventually discovers the rest of the remains, and indications are that the body is that of a young boy, it's been there for decades, and it shows signs of long-running abuse.

Hopeless, right? Not for Harry. Things are complicated by LAPD politics, as they're way too eager to pin the crime on a local one-time pedophile. Also, Harry gets a girl: a rookie cop who's interesting and lively. But it turns out badly.