David McElroy

More than two years after a drunken Tony Logan crashed his car into a city-owned police car — in his own driveway — Logan is still the police chief in Tuscumbia, Ala.

Logan was finally sentenced Tuesday on his DUI conviction. It was in December of 2009 when he ran over his mailbox and smashed into a police car. It was March of 2010 when a jury first convicted him of DUI. And he finally found out his punishment this week — which amounts to almost nothing.

The judge sentenced Logan to a year in jail, but then reduced it to the two days he’s already spent locked up. (Why bother to impose a sentence if you don’t really mean it anyway?) In addition, he’ll lose his driver’s license for 90 days and be subject to random drug screening for two years. There’s also a $761 fine.

In sentencing Logan Tuesday, the judge made it clear that he wasn’t going to treat him harshly because the guy is a police chief.

“Chief Logan, I have never sentenced a police chief for DUI,” the judge said. “You can be assured I’m not going to treat you any differently or any harsher because of your position.”

Why not? Shouldn’t we hold the people put in positions of enforcing laws to a higher standard? And if we’re not going to hold him to a higher standard, shouldn’t we at least make sure he’s no longer in the position to enforce laws over other people?

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Cleaning out the notebook again…

I’m not sure what to say about the Florida GOP results that I haven’t already said over and over again. Barring something completely unexpected, Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. The fall choice will be progressive vs. progressive lite.”

I continue to hear from my Ron Paul-supporting friends that he still has a chance to win. No, he doesn’t. I have more chance of being struck by lightning than he does of winning. A friend accused me Tuesday night of being negative, but it has nothing to do with that. It’s just a hard, cold analysis of the facts. Neither Paul nor anybody else selling libertarian ideas has any chance of winning anytime soon. That’s not what people want.

People don’t understand basic economics. I’m reminded of that frequently. The latest example comes from a couple who live on my street. They had their house on the market for months and months. They had one offer, but that offer was for $20,000 less than the asking price, so they declined it and the house is now off the market.

They talked to me a few days ago about this situation, and the wife kept saying, “I’m just not going to give it away. It’s worth what we’re asking. People just want you to give it to them because prices are down.” No, seriously. I’m not making this up. People don’t understand that something is worth what a willing seller will take and a willing buyer will pay. The value from a few years ago is irrelevant. What they prefer to get is irrelevant. This very nice woman is angry at potential buyers — who she sees as trying to cheat her. She doesn’t understand the market. Sadly, this is the way most people think. It’s the kind of ignorance that leads to wage and price controls, as well as laws to control all sorts of things instead of letting the market work as it’s supposed to. It’s that ignorance that’s leading us to financial ruin.

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Even though I spent a decade in the newspaper business, I’m not sure I know what “news” is anymore. What’s even worse is that I’m not sure I ever did know what it was. Was I in the news business? Or was I in the business of filling holes with trivia to attract readers for our advertisers?

There’s an argument that what we call news has always been fairly banal. A dictionary I consulted said that news is “information about recent and important events,” but who’s to say what’s important? If the market is deciding, isn’t there always going to be a race to the bottom — a race to attract people with sensational and emotional stories rather than any discussion of things that matter?

In “Walden,” Henry David Thoreau wrote of being concerned that our inventions were giving us a technological ability to communicate, but he worried that people didn’t have things to say to each other that really mattered:

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” [Emphasis mine]

What if our whiz-bang technology is ultimately empty in many ways? What if our incredible satellites and TV production facilities and complicated infrastructure give us the means to communicate with one another, but what if the things we have to say are banal and empty? That’s what I’m afraid of.

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