How could I make fun of this town for proposing something that's already in the state law?

In the state law? What the...?

"That would be the scoop," St. Charles Councilman Richard Veit said. "You could call our entire state backwards."

He faxed me the applicable page from the Missouri Code of State Regulations, which indeed reveals that taverns in Missouri are subject to discipline if they fail to prevent their customers from using the aforementioned "indecent, profane or obscene language."

In other words, you're not allowed to swear in a Missouri bar, although it's the bar owner that can get in trouble if you do.

By focusing our resources on a plan to prevent a repeat of 9/11, we may be failing to anticipate and prevent a different attack -- one in which the attackers aren't foreigners but American citizens, whose weapons aren't airplanes but buses, and whose target isn't an office building but a shopping mall.
"Here's the question to ask," says security expert Bruce Schneier, whose book, "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World," argues against the implementation of national I.D. cards. "If we spend $20 billion to stop people from attacking airplanes and then terrorists start blowing up shopping malls, did we become any safer?"

Without China’s billion dollars a day, the United States could not keep its economy stable or spare the dollar from collapse. Would the Chinese use that weapon? The reasonable answer is no, because they would wound themselves grievously, too. Their years of national savings are held in the same dollars that would be ruined; in a panic, they’d get only a small share out before the value fell. China can’t afford to stop feeding dollars to Americans, because China’s own dollar holdings would be devastated if it did. As long as that logic holds, the system works.

As soon as it doesn’t, we have a big problem.